Today on the platform formerly known as Twitter, someone quoted a person who wrote, “weird how you don't find liminal spaces in nature, only manmade buildings”.
This set off a large discussion about whether you can find liminal spaces in nature, including this very apt response, “This guy definitely hasn’t stood in the middle of an Indiana cornfield in the middle of the night.”
Something about Indiana has always struck me as liminal, but that would be another post.
What interest me chiefly about this discussion is the definition of liminal, and its relation to myths.
The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word limen, which means door, threshold, lintel. The most literal liminal thing is the transition space between two rooms.
But thanks to the human brain and the flexibility of metaphorical language, liminality can be taken quite un-literally, as the original poster about man-made spaces found out in his mentions.
Something that is liminal can be anyplace or anything that is neither here nor there, betwixt-and-between, neither this nor that. As the cornfield commenter might have explained, an Indiana cornfield in the middle of the night feels like a place where the doorway to the otherworld is wide open—you have the cornfield, which is a mundane, ordinary place, but which then seems to transform itself into a portal when you add solitude and darkness. It’s not just “spooky,” it actually feels as if you could be swallowed up into some other reality—or meet someone from that reality (as in, e.g., the modern American myth, Children of the Corn).
Time itself can also be liminal. New Year’s Day, the time of transition, is marked with great attention, superstition, and tradition, even though any day of the year can be considered the “start” of a new cycle or season.
Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, Samhain, and other holidays where cultures declare the space between the living and the dead to be temporarily breached and a portal opened, are also liminal times.
And what does this have to do with myths?
I promise I’m getting to that! I’ve gotten a little exuberant with the word count. But we still need some further context.
The recent solar eclipse (another liminal moment of neither-this-nor-that) gave me the opportunity to revisit the purpose of myths. It has often been claimed that myths are chiefly explanations of natural phenomena. Non-technological cultures don’t have science, so they have to resort to myths to figure out what’s going on when the moon obscures the sun’s light.
Poor, primitive mythmakers.
This claim has always rankled me. It is the product of a nineteenth-century mostly European and American attitude that aims to demean and devalue non-European and non-American cultures. “These people we’re conquering are inferior to us, and that justifies us conquering them,” so the idea went.
Funnily enough, Greek mythology tended to escape this evaluation, unless the myths were being told to children. Arachne is the explanation of where spiders come from. Apollo’s chariot is the explanation of why the sun moves across the sky.
There may be some myths that are nakedly explanatory, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Myths are multivalent—they hit on many different levels, have many strengths, many purposes.
If we were to make a general statement, myths are narratives which help us to come to terms with our reality in multiple modes. Myths reinforce to a particular culture, over and over again, who that group of people is and what they believe is the truth about their reality, not only in a physical sense, but in a social, political, psychological and psychical sense.
What is most out of our control and what we most and most often have to come to terms with is the essential locus of myth-making.
We make myths where they are needed, and the meanings of those myths touch all aspects of our lives.
So that’s the context.
If myths help us to come to terms with our reality and in a way control the uncontrollable, it follows that when we are in liminal spaces in our lives, be they physical, psychological, psychic, or temporal, we’re going to make stories about them.
Liminal spaces are not controllable. They are not definable. You can’t determine that a doorway is either in or out. You can’t say that the stroke of midnight is either 2023 or 2024.
You can’t say whether a cornfield in Indiana at night is a worldly or otherworldly place.
And so you get a story like Children of the Corn, which feeds off of that weird feeling, and feeds into the ancient idea that you have to kill something precious in order to ensure that life continues with a successful harvest. Between life and death there is something uncanny.
(Is there a reason why corn is also called maize and at times we have to make our way through a corn maze? Hmmm…)
The ancient Romans understood liminal spaces. Mars was not a god of war to begin with, but a god of agricultural boundaries. The space between this-is-mine-and-that-is-yours, where disputes are most likely to rise up.
Janus is the Roman god par excellence of liminality, the two-faced god of the threshold, the one who could see both forward and back. The tradition was that when Rome was at war, the doors of the temple of Janus were open, and when at peace, closed. During the closed times, was war shut in so that it couldn’t harm or destroy? Or was peace shut in so that it could be preserved and cherished? There was no ancient consensus. Both. Neither. One at one time and one at the other.
That’s what liminality is all about.
And solar eclipses?
Every culture deals with the liminality of an eclipse in a different way. Sometimes it’s about dragons attempting to eat the sun. There’s an elaborate Cherokee legend about the phenomenon. One story I heard that I haven’t been able to track down is that the Maori god of the sun is dancing with the goddess of the moon.
The point here is not that people are clamoring for an explanation. It’s that the event presents an opportunity for myth makers to creatively reinforce, re-present, and repeat the truths, values, and beliefs which make the culture what it is.
So I say to any person who seriously believes it’s weird that liminal spaces only occur in manmade buildings, expand your thinking a little bit.
It would be weird if liminal spaces only occurred in manmade buildings. In fact, it’s perfectly normal for liminal spaces to occur everywhere, especially in our brains.
(Cover image: The Lion Gate of Mycenae, author photo)