As the Hebrew prophet declared “Where there is no vision the people perish” .
It must be abundantly clear by now that we are all living in a society that is totally devoid of vision. Homelessness, unemployment, rising crime, rape, violence, delinquent behaviour, sexual abuse, political unrest, the breakdown of communities, lack of care for our elders, for our children and our neighbours…. the list goes on and on. “Without vision the people perish.” The prophet was not just speaking of the general good of society at large. He was also saying that the individual human spirit must be renewed and revitalized by the quest for vision. He reminds us that vision is good for us all, that if we do not have it we will perish.
Many cultures share a traditional “Rite Of Passage”, a period in which the individual is tested alone in a wilderness place, emerging as a changed and stronger person. Every earth-based culture has had a tradition of enacting formal rites of passage, such as the old Chinese Taoists, Tibetans, Druids, Siberians and Native Americans. The Walkabout of the Australian aborigines is related to this, as are many different rites of passage of African and Asian indigenous people. Oden, the Norse god pierced himself with his own blade, and hung from “Yggdrasil” the Tree of the World for nine nights, where he received the knowledge of the runes, ancient northern symbols of power, medicine and healing. Jesus Christ went out to fast in the desert for 40 days and nights.
In early times, among more traditional or primitive cultures, the transitions of life were clearly defined. Birth, childhood, adulthood, marriage, old age and death were formalized with rites of passage. In modern culture, life transitions are not so clearly defined, our modern life has been demythologized. In the process of becoming technically advanced, modern culture has lost its traditional ways of perpetuating itself through ritual and meaningful, formal growth events.
But in casting aside our ancient, proven ways of marking transition, we have impoverished our lives. There is a basic hunger that cannot be satisfied by material abundance alone. Nowadays, a life transition is not seen in terms of a single, decisive, transformational event by which new status is attained. We often stumble through our adolescence, our marriages, our separations and divorces, our geographical uprootings, our life threatening illnesses, our bereavements and our retirements, ill-prepared to experience and understand them. We fail to notice that by our experience we evolve discreetly, stage by stage, with many little deaths and rebirths.
A rite of passage is the traditional cultures answer to a personal crisis of meaning. Through the rite of passage, individuals and groups make themselves receptive to spiritual meaning. Contact with this spiritual meaning (God, The Great Spirit, The Life Force, Higher Consciousness) resolves the crisis, and the transition is accomplished.
To perceive the true nature of existence was one reason for performing a vision quest; after four days of fasting alone on a high rock, in the great silence and solitude of earth, one is bound to discover that what was thought of as a separate self is not separate from the trees, the rocks, the hawk, the insect peoples, that beyond the senses lies a different plane of consciousness in which all is related, simultaneous, and one.
Peter Mathiessen, “Native Earth” Parabola, vl, 1.
There are many variations of vision quests. The form of the one we use has been drawn from the past. It is a primitive rite of passage adapted to meet the needs of people who live in a modern culture. It is structured to draw upon the power of ancient archetypes and symbols, but only to provide the participant with the tools for the spontaneous creation of their own myths, their own rituals, replete with their own meanings. Only the bare bones, the structural skeleton underlying all such rituals, are made available to them.
Certain basic themes or phases common to all rites of transition were identified by Arnold Van Gennep, in the classic “Les Rites De Passage”. These three phases can be likened to an opening of the door, a stepping across the threshold, and a returning through the door from the other side. The first phase is severance, or separation from everyday life. The individual is required to leave it all behind, to consider the former life to be at an end. The individual is taken away to a place apart and prepares to undergo the second phase of the rite of passage. The second phase is called liminal (latin:- threshold). It entails the direct, existential experience of the meaning of a life transition. The participant steps across the threshold into the unknown armed with symbolic tools of self – birth, and enters a universal order that is sacred and immortal. During this threshold period, secret knowledge and power are transmitted and confer on the individual new rights, privileges and responsibilities upon returning. The third phase, reincorporation, involves the return of the seeker from the spiritual realm of power and knowing, to the mental realm of civilization and the community. Ideally the individual is culturally supported in living out externally the internal changes that have taken place during the rite of passage.
This three – phase dynamic – severance, threshold and reincorporation – is the basic structure of the vision quest. This same process might be seen as a metaphor for the dynamic of life itself. Severance from the mother at birth, immersion in the threshold experience of life, and reincorporation into the great mother at death. Going forth, being, returning. Imagine a wave, breaking in, pausing, and returning to the ocean. Note that the wave, upon returning to the community, carries with it a residue, a part of the sacred shore.
So the structure we use consists of a ten day period, three days of counselling (severance), four days and nights fasting in a wilderness place (threshold), and three days counselling on the participants return (reincorporation). As we work with small groups, no more than eight at a time, the last three days are known as the Elders Circle, where all participants have the right to comment on the experiences of their colleagues to give and gain insights into their experiences.
I have found out in my life that vision questing is a very important part of living on this earth that most of us are deprived of in our modern society. I feel that the lack of these rites of passage is causing a lot of confusion and destruction, the life negation, that is happening at this time.
One impulse from a vernal wood
Can teach you more of ill or good
Than all the sages can.
William Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply”
Vision Quest teaches self-reliance, but it also makes the initiates aware of their “connection” to all of creation, and the responsibility that that entails. And nobody could leave the wilderness without a heightened awareness of their place on the planet. The origins of the Vision Quest may be ancient, but its message could not be more relevant to the world we live in today.
“…..for the problem is nothing if not that of rendering
the modern world spiritually significant….. nothing if
not that of making it possible for men and women to
The modern passage from childhood to adulthood is prolonged, ambiguous, and often painful. The young person must pass through a stage called “adolescence” which allegedly equips him to enter and survive the adult world. Adolescence is generally considered to be a troubled time of rapid emotional change and physical growth marked by clashes with parents and increasingly independent behaviour. During adolescence, the child is expected to apprentice himself to the complex roles of adulthood, to acquire feelings, insights, experiences, and values that reflect maturity. Nevertheless, he is to remain in his place until his eighteenth birthday. At that time he will be magically transformed into a legal, socially responsible, self reliant, sober member of adult society.
In Childhood and Society (1963), Erik Erickson speaks of the modern adolescent’s need to “self-initiate” himself in order to cope with a culture which inhibits his realisation of full ego-identity. Because we do not provide meaningful, coherent and challenging adulthood initiation experiences, young people often create and experience their own. In our small rural town of Stroud in Gloucestershire, the rites of adulthood chosen by many of the young involve drinking, drug-taking, wild partying, underage “thrill driving,” house breaking, theft and violence. None of these activities are encouraged by the community or the law. Yet these adolescents are drawn to such activities because they consider them confirmation of their ability to behave maturely. These self-initiated growth-events, and many more, cannot be discounted as meaningless, destructive, or childish behaviour. They often produce significant spurts in personal growth. Undoubtedly, there are some adolescents who, by virtue of their ability to learn from their experiences, are “adult” long before they reach the legal age of eighteen. Nevertheless, “delinquent” adolescents are a drain on community resources and their parents and families. One mother recently lamented: “Can’t they find a legal way to prove that they’re grown up?”
The “legal” means by which youths prove their maturity can hardly be said to comprise a coherent or meaningful rite of passage. The all-night vigil on the sacred mountain has devolved into an “all-night party.” Few, if any, cultural rites attend a girl’s first menses, a teenagers loss of virginity, the first paid job, the driver’s license, or the attainment of voting rights. Age seems rather to be the primary cultural determinant of maturity. One needs to do nothing to “earn” adulthood but to grow older.
Because our culture lacks coherent, meaningful, and generally sanctioned rites of passage to adulthood, the modern puer aeturnus has emerged – the eternal juvenile who ages, but never leaves childhood, who repeatedly attempts to prove his maturity with self-initiated growth events that are no longer appropriate to age and station.
The puer aeturnus archetype flourishes within our culture primarily because such individuals were never properly initiated into the mysteries, responsibilities and privileges of adulthood. They are still using adolescent means to prove to their peers that they are mature. Until we reintroduce meaningful and commonly sanctioned rites of passage for our young, the eternal juvenile will not only flourish but become an ever more dominant force in our everyday lives.
A Modern Rite of Passage
Our intention here is not to lament the absence of meaningful puberty rites. Rather, we wish to propose the implementation of coherent, authentic, and traditional rites of passage among our youth. Specifically, we would like to discuss a particular rite, based on traditional, pan-cultural “vision” or “dream quest” practices, which have been used among modern adolescents for the last twenty-five years. The model presented here presents but another step in our evolving search for rites or ceremonies of passage that are both relevant and challenging to modern youth growing up in a milieu nearly devoid of such practices.
Though it has many variations, a vision or dream quest always contains three necessary ingredients: fasting for a prolonged period of time (here, four days and nights); complete solitude; and a natural or wilderness setting. These essential ingredients are antipathetic to cultural mores that say:
1. If you go without food you are starving.
2. It is dangerous to be alone without the support of others.
3. Nature in the “wild” is fearsome and perilous.
Hence, such ingredients are rarely found in culturally sanctioned rites of passage. The intent of modern culture seems to be to eliminate the element of risk, to pare down to blandness the existential content of its passage rites. Nevertheless, many modern youths have been challenged to fast alone in the wilderness. Their interest is an indication that the many-thousands-year-old rite is still relevant, regardless of perceived risk. The multi-dimensional benefits they receive from participation will become apparent as the model is presented.
As we practice it, the “vision quest” or “wilderness fast” is a therapeutic form devoid of specific theological content. It is an empty, ceremonial framework filled with, and given meaning by, the values and perceptions of each individual. The central issue is not validation of the belief system but validation of the candidates’ readiness to assume a new life station.
The dynamics of a wilderness fast, or of any rite of passage, were first defined in 1909 by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. The model we describe follows his classic three-phase formula: severance (“separation”), threshold (“marge”), and incorporation (“agregation”) (van Gennep, 1960). First, the child is severed from parents and childhood home and prepared for the trial that confirms his adult, not his adolescent, abilities and sensibilities. Then he goes alone and without food to a wilderness place and remains there for a period of time. The solitary experience of this time of seclusion is called the threshold. Alone and hungry in the threshold world, the candidate is “in the passage,” moving from a former to an antecedent life stage. When the trial is over, the candidate returns to his community and to his life as an adult. The third and final phase of the passage rite involves the incorporation of the candidate. He “in-corporates” by taking on the body of the adult world.
We shall now explore these three phases in detail.
SEVERANCE
The severance period of any rite of passage ceremony is marked by commitment, study, pre-threshold meetings, and preparations on the physical plane. We prepare the students wholistically (physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually) to endure the threshold trial and to incorporate on the other side as adults. The candidate is asked to set his life in order, to “square himself” with parents, peers and loved ones, and to review his childhood with an eye to ending it. An important part of the preparation has to do with helping the young person review his childhood years to find the symbols, archetypes, dreams, teachers, loved ones, gods, heroes, and events that will be relevant to his adult life. He is encouraged to let go of those aspects of childhood that are no longer relevant or realistic. “Who am I now that I am no longer a child?” is a good question to start with. Any answer to the question involves a personal strategy for survival that precludes certain old forms of immature behaviour.
Pre-Threshold Meetings and Classes
The candidate is given time to formally prepare. There is no use in his attaining adulthood via a “quickie” rite of passage. The ideal arrangement is at least two months’ preparation time before the candidates cross the threshold. Thus the course is offered to volunteering seniors in their last term of school.
Pre-threshold preparation includes instruction in self-generated ceremony: i.e., how to perform simple ceremonies for one’s own benefit or for the sake of others. Candidates are shown how to use sound, silence, movement, empowerment, symbols, abstention or taboo. The student studies these basic elements and decides to use them, not to use them, or change them as they see fit.
Instructional Materials
Instructional materials are provided or recommended to the candidates once they have officially declared their intention to participate. We keep this preparatory material simple and relevant to their life passage. They are given a list of formal questions and asked to return the answers in writing or to record the answers in their journals. A typical list of questions runs as follows:
Why was I born?
Why will I die?
Who or what is God?
What is my relationship to God?
When I am afraid, how do I conquer my fear?
Can I live without my mother, father and home? If not, why?
What am I going to do about those things that stand between me and full emancipation from childhood?
What do I really want to do with my life?
Am I willing to go for it?
Who are my real friends?
What do I plan to do when I return from the wilderness? Specifically what?
Who are the real heroes and teachers of my life?
What gifts have I been given to live this life?
There is no dearth of literature, film and drama pertinent to the childhood adulthood theme. The enterprising teacher can arrange for meaningful discussions based on a central myth, story or film. Emphasis must be placed on the relationship of this story to their lives, for now is the time for them to begin working with a realistic yet challenging myth populated with their own kind of monsters, their own teachers, and their own symbols.
Cleaning Up the Room.
Candidates are advised to do whatever they can to “clean up their rooms” before they cross the threshold. This means more than just the actions of picking up clothes, cleaning out rubbish, vacuuming, dusting, or rearranging things in their oft-maligned but private refuges called “bedrooms.” Of course, there is no reason why they cannot do that too. Rather, we emphasise their need to symbolically sever from their childhood by picking it up, dusting it off, cleaning all the junk out, and reassembling it in the shape of adulthood. They cannot do this by laying back and reminiscing about the carefree days of innocence and fun. They have to demonstrate to their parents and to themselves that they can “clean up their rooms” on their own without prompting or help.
One way to “clean their rooms” is to clean their bodies and to make them ready for the threshold trial. This means not only diet preparation but also abstention from drugs and alcohol. The candidate cannot cross the threshold with toxins, residues or other impurities still clinging to his body. He is also asked to prepare himself through training workouts or physical exercise to present himself in good physical condition.
Working responsibly on his own, the candidate collects required signatures and information for his release and medical forms, gathers the necessary equipment together, and comes up with the money to pay for his participation – if this is not possible then a fair exchange of energy can be worked out. The fact that he has to come up with money, by his own efforts, or work it off somehow, enables him to value his participation more than if it has been free. He is reminded that his ability to pay his own way either in cash or work is indicative of his ability to survive as an adult in this culture.
In a very real sense, the preparations that the candidate makes before the threshold determine the world to which he returns. If he leaves his life messy and his affairs in arrears, then he returns to the same disarray. No one will cut his childhood umbilicals for him. Parental participation in this area is vital and encouraged. No one knows better than the parents the true state of the candidates preparations to take on the roles of maturity. The signs of independence from childhood are varied and many, but letting mum or dad do all the work is not one of them. Yet mum and dad are accustomed to doing the work and often have a difficult time keeping out of it. The candidate is counselled to shun parental help when it is offered in this preparatory phase, even when it would save him time, effort or money. Once his parents see him preparing independently, they begin to adjust their perceptions of his abilities and to treat him as though he really is emancipating himself from them.
THE THRESHOLD
The time arrives for the candidates to be removed from the socio-cultural context of their childhood homes and neighbourhoods and be taken to a wilderness place where they can fast and live alone for four days and nights under the supervision of their guides. The guides have to be experienced and well trained in the ways of the wilderness. Their main objective is the safe conveyance of their charges through their threshold ordeal. To that end they have carefully prepared the candidates to survive their isolation and hunger without mishap and with minimum impact on their environment. Mastery of the subject matter of his survival is the most important part of the student’s preparation – and of the guide’s teaching – for the underlying objective of any vision quest ceremony is safety. Hence, threshold area selection, screening, field survival instruction, environmental awareness, emergency and first aid instruction, travelling procedures, basecamp safety, first aid and emergency procedures, are all a part of the curriculum.
Alone and exposed to the elements, he experiences and discovers his relationship to the natural world, of which he is an inseparable part. His solitary sojourn in the wilderness is not a simple camping trip. Literally, he is bonded to the natural environment, and in order to survive, he learns how to accept and live in his surroundings. With a great deal of empty time on his hands, he is compelled to look within and without himself from new perspectives. Because there is no one to help him, he has to face these fears and find his own way of mastering or accommodating them. Fear becomes an ally, bracing him with surges of alertness, insight and courage.
The risk factor of a four-day-and-night solo fast in a wilderness place for youth, or adults, might seem high. Indeed, foundations and insurance companies certainly find it so when we have approached them for funding or for an affordable insurance policy. Nevertheless, we find the model to be safe; certainly to the extent that no one has lost their life or even suffered any grave injury. There have been a few cuts and bruises, to be sure, and a few people get lost (only to find themselves several hours later). The experience produces little if any psychotic reactions, although occasionally psychosomatic ailments are reported. The buddy system, an old Outward Bound technique, makes it possible for the candidates to maintain invisible but daily contact with each other and with base camp in case of emergencies.
A spotless 12-year safety record is due in part to the care and skill of an experienced staff. Another important factor is that of the candidates themselves, who display remarkably good sense, balance, and self-care while they live alone without food in the natural world. They have respected the land they lived upon. They do not challenge or defy it. They are compelled to accommodate themselves to it.
Returning Early from the Threshold
Sometimes a young person will return early from the threshold period. About one in ten “abort” in this way. Untried, inexperienced in the art of measuring themselves, they sometimes bite off more than they can chew.
Extra time is spent with these young candidates who often sink deeply into feelings of “failure.” But the threshold is a “self-test” and in a self-test there is no failure. Every candidate is unique. Adulthood itself is presented as a way of testing oneself in the world, not an examination to be passed or failed. Candidates and their parents alike are advised to hold this in mind. The early return of a candidate gives him an opportunity to know his limits and to see what kept him from enlarging them. The experience of “failure” is incorporated within a positive educational orientation to personal growth.
Parental Participation
It is typical for a young candidate to return from the threshold claiming that while he was alone and starving he remembered his parents with great fondness and love. During the threshold trial the “participation” of parents reaches its fullest extent. Of course, the parents were not even there: the child was alone and on his own – beyond their direct intervention.
Most parents are understandably proud when their child announces his intention to participate in the passage rite. They are pleased that their parenting has led him to be challenged by such a test. He has chosen to demonstrate his maturity in a meaningful way. On the other hand, they are understandably anxious. Have they done right by their child? What about all the times they failed, or were weak? What about the storms that are even then breaking at home? Parental anxiety often reflects the current status of emancipation struggles between parents and child.
Parents often express the desire to participate in such a way as to maximise the benefits they and their child receive from his candidacy. Their participation at pre-threshold and/or incorporation meetings is encouraged, for the meetings often prompt a dialogue between parents and child regarding their and his ideas of what constitutes adulthood. Many parents regard the wilderness fast as an important step toward maturity and expect more adult attitudes and behaviour from their child when he returns. A young candidate can be strengthened in his own sense of maturity if his parents are willing to open a more adult environment for him within which to practice his new responsibilities and privileges. The incorporation phase is made a thing of beauty when the parents are prompted to talk about topics like love and family and the impending time when Susan or David will no longer live at home and there will be a clean, empty bedroom in the house.
We have found it beneficial to invite the parents of candidates to meet together, without their children, at least twice during the course of the passage rite. One meeting is held during the four-day-and-night period during which their children are fasting in the wilderness. A period of silence is maintained in honour of them.
A second meeting is convened in the incorporation phase, within a week after the candidates have returned. The parents meet to talk about changes that have occurred in their relationships with their incorporating children. Again, the accent is on the positive – not on their misery as parents but their opportunities, challenges and learning situations. The parents are encouraged to look ahead to the time when they will no longer be actively parenting. What else does their life story hold in store for them?
INCORPORATION
The candidate’s “birth” into the secular body of adulthood is almost always accompanied by “contractions” far more powerful than those he might have experienced during the threshold phase. Now the child-adult has to start the painful process of proving he is “grown-up.” Personal preparedness and ceremonial attention to the re-entry process, always a dangerous and challenging time, can mitigate the confusion and bewilderment of the return. If guides and parents alike take certain precautions, the difficulties are eased.
Incorporation, the third and final phase of the passage rite, is the most critical. The returnee need validation and understanding. He also needs to sever from the “guides” and from the threshold passage itself. The passage has to be “sealed off,” psychologically speaking, so that the candidate cannot go backward through it and wind up in childhood again. Thus the guide warns the candidate not to become nostalgic about his threshold journey. The new adult cannot go back to the womb now that he has left it. He has to be turned gently but firmly toward the world of civilisation and experience that he must inherit – where the “doing” of his vision awaits him:
“I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.”
(Black Elk)
The candidate has to return and prove that the rite he has experienced has truly confirmed his worthiness to be adult.
Ideally, as a graduation exercise, the fasting quest might be offered at the end of the last year of the candidate’s schooling. The candidate might then return to a post-school life and the beginnings of adult responsibility apart from the placenta of home and school. Family, peers, and the community at large would honour his new life status. In our experience, however, this ideal is hardly ever attainable. Candidates often return to the holding pattern of adolescence and to the family they left behind. This incorporation within the childhood context hardly approximates the transformation in social station accomplished by a traditional rite. Nevertheless, some of the ancient power is rescued when the candidate returns to at least a modicum of support. Some of this support is elicited by his own behaviour, which manifests shifts in personal values and life goals. Some validation and support comes from parents, siblings or friends. With the aid of significant others, the candidate drops certain symbols of his childhood and replaces them with new ones from the adult world. He begins to look even more seriously at the practicalities of making it on his own, without relying on the help of his parents.
Regardless of the homes they return to, candidates are reminded to set concrete and realistic goals for themselves. Ambiguous or currently unrealisable goals are not necessarily discouraged, for the seeds of a visionary life might be present there – emphasis is placed, however, on the candidate completing the first, practical steps of incorporation. If he cannot take these steps, he might very well lapse into paralysis or lassitude. Among the first practical steps might be:
Getting a job
Performing well at school
Living responsibly and in peace at home
Improving relationships and communication with parents or siblings
Ending drug or alcohol dependence
Starting to live with financial responsibility
Making careful choices about who was really a friend
Ceasing to blame others for his own situation.
Such practical actions are the skeletons to which the muscle and nerve of the candidate’s life story begin to adhere.
When the parents see practical actions being taken by their returning children, they are encouraged to open the door marked “adulthood” even wider. A variety of sensitive issues are raised when the parents play their cards right. Many decide to confer new levels of responsibility and privilege on their offspring in exchange for commitments to the wholeness and well being of the household as long as he dwells there. Some choose to let him in on family or personal matters previously withheld from confidence.
From the perspective of the “midwives” (the guides of the rite), the passage rite has not been completed until each candidate has taken necessary formal steps in incorporation. The candidates emerging from the threshold ordeal can be seen as infant adults. They have to be carefully incorporated into the bodies of adults, “grounded” and “centred” within the circles of their new intent. Simple but meaningful activities are built into the first few hours of their return. These serve to focalise their purpose and illustrate the challenge of adulthood. The preparation and sharing of food, giving gifts, making speeches, thanking the earth for protection, cleaning up camp, hiking out, washing off the dust of the threshold world and changing into clean clothes, are given special emphasis.
Council of Elders
In Native American societies where rites of passage were an integral part of cultural life, those who returned from the threshold were often brought back to a group of community elders who listened to the returnee recount his experiences, discussed with him their meaning, gave him a new name, and validated (formally accepted) his new life status in the community. In modern times, by and large, such councils do not exist with the power to confer adult status on the child. Nevertheless, they can be of great worth as an additional step in the incorporation of the new adult. Our “elders’ circles” consist of guides and older adults who are familiar with the fasting quest process and are willing to stand as witnesses to the young candidates’ accomplishments.
The elders’ questions cover the various aspects of the quester’s participation in the vision quest. They make comments, share insights, and generally support those aspects of the candidate’s character which they consider heroic, balanced, sound, strong, self-reliant, mature, etc. The basic assumption shared by all is: as the candidate has behaved and reacted during the threshold trial, so he will behave and react in his life. Emphasis is clearly placed on the candidate’s ability to solve his own problems. Parents participating in the council further enrich the meaning and long-term effects of their children’s experience.
Long-Term Benefits
The candidate’s journey into adulthood is not merely outward, toward physical or social objectives, but also inward, toward self-realisation. The incorporating returnee now faces the adult wilderness. The vision quest of his life has begun. Now he discovers the truth of the old adage, “One does not go to the Sacred Mountain merely for oneself but for the good of one’s people.” The young adult has created a new balance from an imbalance in the body social and in his family. He has successfully marked his passage from the uncertainty of adolescence to the challenge of adulthood. In the process, his parents, family, friends, and relations all benefit. The entire culture is enriched by his solitary journey.
In the end, it is exceedingly difficult to draw hard and fast rules about how the incorporation process works. Every returnee travels a unique path. There are no valid criteria by which to measure his success or failure to negotiate his own labyrinth. Some candidates go off to further studies (another kind of holding pattern), but at least they have left home. Others find jobs and are emancipated from home within a year or two. Some enrol at the local community college and continue living at home. Some enrol in the armed services, often as an alternative to living in an insufferable home situation. A few have married before they were twenty-one. A small percentage has run foul of the law (we also offer the fasting quest to “at-risk” youth) and a smaller percentage still has served time up in prison.
An evaluation of the programme for youth entering adulthood turned up predictable shifts in attitudes, values, and behaviours, such as “strengthened self-image, increased independence and self-reliance, positive, long-term changes in family relationships, and feelings of being supported by parents and siblings up to six months after the threshold period ended.”
But statistics do not tell the real story.
The real story is told by the subjective life experiences of each individual. There are ups and downs. There are times of clarity, illumination and growth. There are also times when the person wonders if he has made any progress at all. The depressions, nevertheless, are essential to the continued growth of each one. As the yogi told his disciples, “After samadhi, we sweep the floor.” A young person cannot be incorporated into adulthood when his head is in the clouds – he would fail to see the dust seeping through the cracks and the dirty dishes piling up in the sink. Dreams and visions will not clean the house or put food on the table. No doubt, however, the visionary resolve he brings back from the threshold will bring him many floors to sweep.
CONCLUSION
British culture is many years away from wholehearted adoption or implementation of such traditional life-passage ceremonies as the one described here. Though there is a tendency to accept the basic assumption that “such activities are good for our youth,” there is a corresponding tendency to fear or denigrate such activities as fasting or living alone in the wilderness. Many westerners have been so set into the “modern way” of convenience, plenitude, and immediate sensory gratification that the very idea of “going without” is a threat to their sense of well-being and propriety. Obviously, until they are acceptable to the culture, passage rites will not be a part of the British State School Curriculum.
In the meantime, it is hoped that the practice of fasting alone in the wilderness will grow modestly but steadily throughout the country, propagated by private and alternative schools, drug rehabilitation centres, and outdoor education programs. Twenty years ago, such programmes did not exist in British culture, except in isolated instances where far-seeing parents or relatives of teenage children provided such experiences for their charges. As the practice of the vision or fasting quest gradually becomes a part of our culture, more institutions dealing with the young or with “at-risk” youth will open their curricula to include it.
In these days, many say that the health of our culture depends on our ability to provide a “growth context” in which our children can mature and find meaning and purpose. Many also say that the current cultural means of providing “growth-events” are inadequate, that children are growing up as spectators rather than participants, that too many of our youth are content merely to dream the dreams of others instead of acting on their own. Many say that the times are critical, not only for us here in the British Isles, but for the world, that we need young men and women of courage, imagination and commitment who are not afraid of the challenge of the future. This proposal addresses that need.
“…..for the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the modern world spiritually significant…… nothing if no that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the condition of contemporary life.”
Joseph Campbell – “The Hero with A Thousand Faces.”
Appendix
Excerpts from teenagers’ journals made during their threshold time indicate the quality and tenor of the experiences and the insights they gained:
Eric, 15:
Why am I here, Wind? What purposes do I have in this world? How can I control my emotions, like anger and fear, and all the others, so that they will help me instead of tearing me apart?
Your purpose is to help and make happier the people on earth.
Who am I, Wind?
Take off your ring. What shape is it?
It is a circle.
What are you sitting in?
A circle.
How many sides does a circle have?
It doesn’t have any sides.
Good. Now, where does it end?
It doesn’t have an ending.
You are right.
But what does this have to do with the questions I’m asking you?
Have Patience and listen. I am like a circle. I have no ending. But when my cycle ends, your cycle ends.
Why is this?
Because you are a part of me and I am a part of you. Remember this: when our cycles end, the world ends. Understand the circle and you will understand yourself. As for your emotions, you do not want to control them, but to understand them. Then you will be able to deal with them. This goes the same with people.
Wind, how do you know these questions before I ask them?
Remember, I am a part of you and you are a part of me. Now go and enjoy your surroundings. Tonight I will speak to you again.
Thank you, Wind.
You a welcome, Companion of the Wind.
Annette, 17:
The thunder is shaking and I am scared. . . . I sure hope that there are no flash floods. Don’t rain, please. I am not ready for rain. I want someone to hold me. I feel lonely, very lonely now that those rain clouds are coming. . . .I hate the fact that all I can do is sit and wait, sit and wait. I can feel what loneliness is . . . . I HOPE IT DOESN’T RAIN! I’m not the homesick type, but I would give almost anything to be with my parents.
Sue, 17:
Today I made my circle and named myself Lone Stone Among the Rest. . . . Then later this afternoon I sang my name and walked around my circle. Doing this gave my name more depth and meaning. After I had been walking around my circle I had to quit because I was losing my balance. I started singing it again, when I got to my place overlooking the valley. I started to cry yet I continued. My name symbolised my cutting the line connecting me to my parents, making me a separate and unique human being.
Keenan, 16:
Crisp and cold. I awoke with a bloody nose. I’m tired today; my energy is gone. I sit in darkness surrounded by light. My eyes see beauty, but my bones feel death is near. My mind tells me that soon I shall rejoin and rejoice with my people. . . .Oh, the wind is cold when it blows across my body. It makes me feel so alien — though why should this be? My ancestors lived with the land for hundreds of thousands of years. But I feel so puny, so exposed, like the spark of life within me is so small.
Rich, 18:
I can’t overcome this intense feeling of loneliness. I keep thinking I won’t make it. But I know I just have to. The day is so long. The sun never seems to set. I’m very hungry. I just can’t go to sleep. I cried tonight. I cried because I’m real lonely. I’ve never experienced anything so awful.
Claudia, 17:
I saw a bright, fiery ball. There was a black hole in the middle of it. I felt my whole being rushing, as if vacuumed, toward that hole. I entered it. Blackness all around me. So peaceful. The feeling of being received, accepted. I opened my eyes. I was here, on Earth! I realised that that image symbolised my Passage. I was born to this exciting, beautiful, ugly, dangerous, receiving Earth.
David, 18:
At dawn I awoke to find myself surrounded by “Wessex Longhorns” I could just make out their faces in the mist. What could have been a very scary sight was in actual fact very comforting, I had a strong sense that these cows were in fact protecting me as I moved through the passage to becoming a “Man”. No, they were actually helping me. Eight Longhorns, in a perfect circle around me, each one touching horns with the next. They were all looking at me in the centre of the circle, covering me with their breath. Through the breath of ancient cattle I became a “MAN”.
Martin Shaw talks to David Wendl-Berry about Rites Of Passage, Vision Quests and Encountering the Earth
Having just read “Rites of Passage for Men” by Steve Banks in Self & Society No 5., I thought your readers might be interested in a different perspective on “Rites of Passage”.
I first met David Wendl-Berry when I signed up to do a Vision Quest in North Wales. Having found the experience profoundly powerful, I was fascinated to know more about the process, its roots, and what motivated him to start running these groups.
David Wendl-Berry was originally trained to guide people through the Vision Quest by Steven Foster and Meredith Little at “The School of Lost Borders” in Eastern California. He also apprenticed to Sun Bear, a Chippewa Medicine Man, as well as travelling the States working with a variety of Native American teachers.
He has been guiding people through the Vision Quest Rite of Passage for almost twenty years.
In 1999 he set up Earth Encounters a Centre For Wilderness Rites Of Passage, a new facility, designed to promote and celebrate wilderness and personal renewal through nature, which is based on ways to use the natural world for therapeutic purposes.
When the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal, or personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the mono-myth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labour of bringing the runes of wisdom, the golden fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may rebound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.
Joseph Campbell, “Hero With a Thousand Faces”
Martin Shaw: Could you start off by telling us what a “Rite of Passage” is?
David Wendl-Berry: A “Rite of Passage” is a ceremony specifically designed to facilitate change. In other words, it’s a ceremony created to help people move from one stage of their lives to the next. If we take a look at the movement from childhood to adulthood, we can see that a part of the persons life is coming to an end i.e., childhood, and a part of the persons life is about to start i.e. adulthood. In between there is a death and a birth. A death to the past and a birth to the future. We have a process that starts with an ending (end of childhood) has a middle (death/birth) and ends with a beginning (adulthood).
Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep first defined the dynamics of a wilderness fast, or of any rite of passage, in 1909. The model we describe followed his classic three-phase formula: severance (“separation”), threshold (“marge”), and incorporation (“agregation”) (van Gennep, 1960). First, the child was severed from parents and childhood home and prepared for the trial that confirmed his adult, not his adolescent, abilities and sensibilities. Then he went alone and without food to a wilderness place and remained there for a period of time. The solitary experience of this time of seclusion was called the threshold. Alone and hungry in the threshold world, the candidate was “in the passage,” moving from a former to an antecedent life stage. When the trial was over, the candidate returned to his community and to his life as an adult. The third and final phase of the passage rite involved the incorporation of the candidate. He “in-corporated” by taking on the body of the adult world.
M.S. How does this apply to the man in the street, to Mr. Normal out there?
D.W.B. Okay, say for instance, you are a man in his mid forties, you’re married with three children, have your own house, car and computer soft-ware company. Your wife’s having an affair; your kids spend your money, wear your clothes, drive your car, never listen to you, never talk to you and generally use your house as a hotel. You are beginning to ask your self “is this what I’ve worked all my life for, what the hell am I doing. There must be more to life than this for God’s sake.” You know something has to change, but what, and how? You feel a deep, deep dissatisfaction with your life. Then you stumble upon a flyer telling you about “Rites Of Passage” somewhere in the mountains of North Wales.
You read: –
“So, leaving it all behind, you head for the Sacred Mountain taking your problem, your dilemma, your need for understanding and fulfilment to the breast of Mother Earth, there you will remain alone, fasting, seeking, crying for vision, for a period of up to four days and night.”
All of a sudden something in your gut turns, you are not sure what or why, but for some inexplicable reason, you know you have to do this. You’ve never heard of “Vision Quests”, no real idea of what it is. But deep in your being you know, you recognise, you are responding to something that has been the way for your ancestors for thousands of years.
You know, every earth-based culture has had a tradition of enacting formal rites of passage of one kind or another such as the Celts, Siberians, Africans, Tibetans and Native Americans.
We really need to understand, the way these traditional cultures have understood, that the most effective way of moving from one life stage to another, is by “marking” that transition with ritual and ceremony. One of the most effective and simple ways of doing this is to allow our selves to really feel, deeply feel our connection to the land, and allow the land to move us.
In certain traditional cultures, the teenagers would be taken away from their mothers and sent out into the wilderness to be alone and to fast. To nourish themselves on the breast of they’re Greater Mother, Nature, the Land, and the Earth. During this liminal time, the boy or girl would encounter the edge or the limit of their previous lives as children and formally jump or step beyond, into their new lives as adults.
I have noticed that, when asked what passage they are in, most middle-aged men who come to us looking for new direction in their lives inevitably focus on the transition from boyhood to manhood. Because they have never formally made that transition, they seem to have the feeling that they have always been boys trying to be a men.
Transition or the movement from one stage of your life to another, is really the core of the course that we run, which is actually a very simple rite of passage that has been taken from the Native American Vision Quest and adapted to make it applicable to people living in our culture.
Although the basic structure follows the Native American model of three days of preparation (severance), four days and night of fasting isolation and exposure (threshold), and three days of telling your stories and listening to feedback (reintegration), the actual ceremonies and activities that each person performs or enacts are purely their own.
When I first started doing this work, after my training in America, it was very much oriented towards Native American ways. Not surprising, considering that most of my training had been with Native American teachers, but over the years of doing this work in the mountains of North Wales almost all of the Native American influences have dropped away. We now take all our guidance from the land itself.
M.S. Could you try to tell us what it’s actually like to do a Vision Quest?
D.W.B. My experience of Vision Questing is that it can be hard work, especially in North Wales. Anyone who goes to do a Vision Quest thinking that they are going to spend a few days in a spiritual wonderland without having to work too much, are in for a shock.
Very often you find yourself sitting on the side of a mountain in the pouring rain, or in woods or open moorland with a cold wind gusting around you. Your sleeping bag is probably damp and clammy, your belly is empty and grumbling, you’ve probably got a headache and you feel as miserable as sin.
Even if the weather is beautiful and sunny, and you spend most of your time bathing in its glory, you will probably find that you can’t avoid your own darkness sneaking up on you. It’s quite remarkable how the weather will start to reflect your inner state. I was told that on a Vision Quest you always get the weather you need, I found that to be quite true.
Four days and night can seem like an eternity, fear will probably raise its ugly head, and so will boredom. You might well find that an awful lot of suppressed pain, anger, hatred, grief, guilt or whatever will start to surface, and it’s you that has to work it through.
You might well feel that its all too much for you to handle, that you’re all alone with it. But you’re not; the whole of nature is around you ready and willing to be of help. You might even get the sense that behind you are all those who have gone before, all those who have gone this way, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohamed, Black Elk, Crazy Horse, Odin and millions of others. You are now walking in their footsteps.
Over the period of four days your inhibitions will drop, your resistance will give way, and you find that you can give yourself permission to cry, to do ceremonies, to hug trees, to scream at the sky, to do whatever it is you need to do. After all there’s no one there to stop you or judge you. You are the Ceremonial Leader, the Medicine Person, and you find that nature does respond.
I have found that nature seems to have a way of drawing all this stuff out of you, of purging you if you like. But you really need to be ready to give it away, to give it to the Earth as good fertiliser. Healing, insight, understanding, power, direction, love and bliss can come to you at any time, and they may not. It really depends on what you need at the time.
People who take a question or a problem to the land will always get what they need. This is not necessarily what they expect, or what they want, but it always seems to be what they need.
No, doing a Vision Quest is certainly not easy, it can push you to your limits. But it is immensely powerful, rewarding and life transforming. I have not met one person who has left the wilderness without a heightened awareness of their place in nature. After all, we are of nature, we are Human Nature.
M.S. Could you tell us why any one would want to go through a Rite Of Passage, I mean, what’s the point of it?
D.W.B. In my mind, most of the problems we face in the late twentieth century stems from the deep-seated feeling of being separate. In fact it has been seen as a virtue to see ourselves as individuals striving to better ourselves in a materialistic world often at the expense of others. We justify this by saying that everyone has the right to do this.
But at what expense?
This separation, separation from nature, has the most appalling consequences. We are badly abusing the plant and animal kingdoms, and we are polluting our planet and our atmosphere beyond recognition. I believe that abuse, violence, and the destruction of our environment and our planet, the life negation that is happening right now has a lot to do with the lack of formally sanctioned Rites Of Passage in our society.
Rites Of Passage have always been used to help people move from one stage of their lives to another, and so it can today, moving from childhood to adulthood, getting married or divorced, changing career, going through mid-life crisis, looking for new direction, moving into retirement (becoming an elder), or even just going out on the land to reconnect with the power and beauty of creation. I was once told by an old medicine man “the greatest shamen, saints, medicine men, mystics etc. only ever had one real teacher, and that was the Earth Mother. They would go out there and sit on her bones and she would teach them all they needed to know.” We can still do that, and we should. Actually it is my feeling that the Earth really needs us to do just that.
M.S. What motivated you to start running Vision Quests in this country?
D.W.B. I used to be a Film Editor working for a large TV station and earning a very good wage. But I always felt that there was something missing in my life. I tried to fill that gap with work, with material objects, new stereo, car, books, records, things. Or I would try to fill that gap with sex, drugs, rock & roll, living the high life. Telling myself I was “successful”. But in the quiet of my own silence I would be aware of something missing, a gap, an emptiness that nothing could fill, and a sense of being alone. A darkness would creep over me and I would doubt, and questions would arise, why am I doing this? I didn’t choose to be a film editor, I just fell into it. What am I doing here? What am I supposed to be doing with my life? What is my true purpose, my path? Why do I feel so lonely and where does all this despair come from.
I worked in a group, studying the teachings of Gurdjieff for years. Flirted with Subud, Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, Meditation, Taoism, Martial Arts especially Aikido and Tai Chi. But still there was some thing missing. Even after therapy, I still could not put my finger on it.
Then one day in July 1981 I bumped into an old friend of mine who was a Buddhist, he told me that a Native American Medicine Man called Sun Bear would be giving a talk and did I want to go along with him. I had no idea why I was going to see this man, I had no real interest in Native Americans, but something stirred in me so I went.
Listening to Sun Bear I knew without a doubt that my life was about to change forever. I understood what it was that was missing for me in all the paths that I came across. A connection to the land. My Sacred Land. Mother Earth.
It wasn’t long before I found myself on a plane to Washington State to do an Apprentice Screening Program and my first Vision Quest, (four days and nights of fasting, isolation and exposure); my whole life was about to be turned upside down and inside out. I found myself being an emotional yo-yo, being confronted and challenged on every possible level.
My first Vision Quest there, up on Vision Mountain really pushed me to my limit. One of Sun Bear’s helpers took my to a place on the mountain and said “This is your place, you stay here, see you in four days, may the Spirit be with you, protect you and give you the Vision you seek.” then she left.
I was suddenly on my own, and the only word that stuck in my mind was PROTECT. Protect me from what? What did she mean? Am I in danger? Oh shit, what the hell am I doing here? A 34-year-old English film editor with a drug habit and a potbelly, stuck on the edge of some mountain thousands of miles from home without food, or shelter, and nobody to talk to. Do they have Cougars here? Bears? Rattle Snakes? Coyotes?
It then occurred to me that I was somewhat out of my depth. But it was such a beautiful sunny day and I had the most stunning view across the Cascade Mountains. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do there, Sun Bear didn’t give me any ceremonies to do and there was very little in the way of preparation. I found myself thinking of my life, all the good things that had happened to me and all the bad. Old memories from childhood started to surface, and gradually I became aware that it was getting dark. My thoughts were getting dark too.
I started to hear Coyotes howling in the distance and found myself thinking, “this is a big mistake, I shouldn’t be here at all, something might well come and eat me, or I’m going to go mad, maybe even die”. Fear began to raise it’s ugly head, so I did what all good Englishmen of no bottle do in such situations, buried myself head first into the bottom of my sleeping bag.
I think it was sometime on the second day that I saw it. Right in the middle of my circle, sitting on a twig. The weirdest looking creature. A Praying Mantis. I’d never seen one before apart from on TV. It was just sitting there, shedding its skin, and sitting in the sunlight, perfectly still. I watched it for hours as the sun passed overhead. I picked up the twig taking it out of the shadows, and placed it in the sunlight again. Suddenly the mirror opened up, and I could see that what it was doing, I was doing, and what it was showing me, I needed to do.
Sun Bear had told me that nature is continuously informing us, but we fail to see and hear because our minds are so crazy. Sitting there on the side of that mountain a Praying Mantis was reflecting back my own process. I was praying, I was shedding my skin; I was putting myself in the light. It was showing me its medicine, the Power of Stillness showing me that I needed to still my mind and go within. That is where I would find my power, my story and my healing.
As the days passed I gradually became aware of my connection to creation. I felt intimately connected to Raven, Bear, Snake, Dragonfly, Cloud, Tree, Stone, Lightening, to the Earth. I was not a separate entity; I was very much a part of it all.
To really make the Vision Quest work in one’s life one needs to give it away. You don’t ever vision quest for yourself alone; you do it for your people. It came to me that I should be doing this work on my land with my people, to be the “Gift Bearer” if you like.
M.S. As someone who has completed many Vision Quests What do you think the process has added to your life?
D.W.B. Simply by placing myself in a wilderness setting for a prolonged period of time, where all the images coming to me (sight sound and smell etc.) were of nature, I find that I could naturally drop my sense of being separate, and experience a deep connection to all of creation.
If we can hold onto the power and beauty of our quest, hold on to that connection, we might be able to start making changes in our lives. We can empower ourselves even more by going back to our place on the mountain every year to reconnect, then we find that we are in an on-going process of growth. One quest leads on from the last. The story continues, one step at a time, slowly bringing us back into harmony with our true nature. Slowly untangling the knots of our separation. But please don’t make the mistake that the more you do it the easier it gets, I’ve found that this isn’t necessarily the case. Questing can bring up an awful lot of material that needs to be dealt with. As is often said “the story of the quest is the story of your life”, and Great Mother Nature is the best therapist I’ve found. All you need do is go to her. Questing in this way has added a whole new dimension to my life. A sense of being alive, having a purpose, seeing and knowing my place within the whole, and an understanding of the responsibilities that goes with that.
M.S. Do you think every one should do a Vision Quest?
D.W.B. I do feel that everyone should go through some form of rites of passage, in nature, at the right time. So that they can live their lives connected to the beauty of creation and take on the responsibilities and behave according to the stage of life that they are in.
But to Vision Quest the way I do, no. I don’t think it’s suited to everyone. Each person should find his or her own way with it. That’s what we do at Earth Encounters, we help people find their own way, courses can be designed to help you learn how to use the Earth as therapist, teacher and healer. You can structure your progress from very gentle ways of working with the land too much more demanding Rites Of Passage.
M.S. How would you like to see the Vision Quest work progressing, and exactly what is Earth Encounters?
D.W.B. I feel that Vision Quests should be made available to everyone, but most importantly to our youth. I would really like to see schools implementing formally sanctioned “Rites Of Passage” for their teenagers. I think that it’s essential that adolescents be offered rites of passage so as to properly initiate themselves into the mysteries, responsibilities and privileges of adulthood. I also feel that teachers should be trained in Wilderness Rites Of Passage, so that they can guide their own teenagers through such passage rites safely, but of course this implies that they should go through it themselves, only then could they guide others through it.
So after a lot of thought I have decided to bring “Earth Encounters” into existence, a Centre For Wilderness Rites Of Passage, a new facility, designed to promote and celebrate wilderness and personal renewal through nature. The centre will be offering various courses, the heart of which is the Vision Quest. These courses will be structured to suit the personal needs of all applicants, introductory workshops, shorter quests like two day and nights, or even twenty four hours and weekends that will lead up to a vision quest.
M.S. And lastly, when you’re running all these groups in the mountains, what do you get out of it. It’s not something that’s going to make you rich is it?
D.W.B. Really there is nothing more beautiful, and more moving, and more touching, than the look in a questers eyes when they return. It’s that look, it really is. That is worth all the trouble, all the effort and all the sacrifice, and I would rather be doing this than any thing else in the world.
It’s a privilege to be the “Gift Bearer”.
MARTIN SHAW is a musician, artist and sometime writer who lives near Totness in Devon. He can be reached on Tel: 01364631217 or Mobile No. 07789537106.
