Liminal festivals Certain cultural and religious festivals create widespread periods of liminality. For example, Carnival in Brazil and Mardi Gras in New Orleans temporarily invert social norms and hierarchies, allowing participants to step outside everyday roles. Similarly, Diwali in India marks a transition between darkness and light, symbolizing spiritual liminality.
Liminal spaces in ritual and pilgrimage Major religious pilgrimages such as the Hajj in Islam or the Kumbh Mela in Hinduism are periods of mass liminality, with participants leaving ordinary life and entering a sacred, transitional space.
Liminality in migration and borderlands Border crossings—whether literal (e.g., international borders, refugee camps) or figurative—create liminality for migrants and refugees who exist between countries, cultures, or legal statuses.
Digital/virtual liminality Online environments such as virtual reality spaces, internet forums, and social media can also be liminal, as users inhabit zones outside of physical reality and ordinary social constraints.
In rites 's
Die Ziviltrauung ("The Civil Marriage"), 1887 Liminality is a characteristic feature of rites, where the transitional phase is intentionally created and marked by ceremony, unlike spontaneous liminal situations such as natural disasters. Anthropologists have documented such phases in diverse cultures, including initiations, funerals, and periods of social inversion and protest. The liminal phase can also be extended to more modern transitions, such as the interval after completion of university assignments until the receipt of a diploma. Such "no man's land" periods function as social and psychological limbos, prompting reflection and transformation. Ritual liminality covers diverse transitions: the period between engagement and marriage, the interval between death and burial, and other culturally institutionalized observances. These moments often feature prohibitions and taboos even in liberal societies; for example, restrictions on sexual conduct during engagement. Many rites involve transformational liminality: in proposals or public declarations, the space between question and answer is recognized as a liminal zone, wherein the future may diverge greatly. Event theorists also note planned liminal experiences, such as ceremonies, festivals, and conferences, where "time out of time" and spatial detachment form core elements of collective meaning.
In time The temporal dimension of liminality can relate to moments (sudden events), periods (weeks, months, or possibly years), and epochs (decades, generations, maybe even centuries).
Examples Twilight serves as a liminal time, between day and night—where one is "in the twilight zone, in a liminal nether region of the night". The title of the television fiction series The Twilight Zone makes reference to this, describing it as "the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition" in one variant of the original series' opening. Noon and, more often, midnight can be considered liminal, the first transitioning between morning and afternoon, the latter between days. Within the years, liminal times include equinoxes when day and night have equal length, and solstices, when the increase of day or night shifts over to its decrease. This "qualitative bounding of quantitatively unbounded phenomena" marks the cyclical changes of seasons throughout the year. Where the quarter days are held to mark the change in seasons, they also are liminal times.
New Year's Day, whatever its connection or lack of one to the astrological sky, is widely regarded as a liminal time. Customs such as fortune-telling commonly make use of this transitional state. In many cultures, actions and events on the first day of the year are believed to influence the year ahead, as reflected in practices like
first-foot. It is also considered a time particularly susceptible to hauntings by
ghosts, understood as liminal beings—entities neither fully alive nor fully dead.
In religion Judeo-Christian worship to heaven Liminal existence can be located in a separated
sacred space, which occupies a
sacred time. Examples in the Bible include the dream of Jacob (
Genesis 28:12–19) where he encounters God between heaven and earth and the instance when
Isaiah meets the Lord in the temple of holiness (
Isaiah 6:1–6). In such a liminal space, the individual experiences the revelation of
sacred knowledge where God imparts his knowledge on the person. Worship can be understood in this context as the church community (or
communitas or
koinonia) enter into liminal space corporately. Dr. Timothy Carson, curator of the Liminality Project, co-founder of the Guild for Engaged Liminality with Lisa Withrow and Jonathan Best, and co-founder The Liminality Press with Lisa Withrow, explores the outer and inner aspects of liminality, addressing the history of the discipline with mythological and psychological underpinnings, and an application of the concepts to
theology,
Biblical hermeneutics, symbolism, and practical applications for those engaged in religious leadership. In
Crossing Thresholds: A Practical Theology of Liminality, Carson serves as co-author with Rosy Fairhurst, Nigel Rooms, and Lisa Withrow, as they define the aspects of liminality vis-à-vis its practical applications in religious life. The book includes a conceptual description of liminality as well as applications for hermeneutics,
liturgy,
ecclesiology, leadership, learning, faith formation, and
pastoral care and crisis. In
Leaning into the Liminal: A Guide for Counselors and Companions, Carson utilizes a model informed by liminality – The Rites of Passage process – as a pan-theoretical resource for counselors, therapists, religious leaders,
spiritual directors, and
chaplains. It includes reflections on the role of the liminal guide, as well as contributions by seven other authors who address a variety of therapeutic models, healing the wounds of war, spiritual direction, and guiding through the end passages of life.
Of beings Various minority groups can be considered liminal. In reality, immigrants (present but not "official"), and stateless people, for example, are regarded as liminal because they are "betwixt and between home and host, part of society, but sometimes never fully integrated". The "
trickster as the mythic projection of the magician—standing in the
limen between the sacred realm and the profane" and related
archetypes embody many such contradictions as do many
popular culture celebrities. The category could also hypothetically and in
fiction include
cyborgs,
hybrids between two species,
shapeshifters. One could also consider seals, crabs, shorebirds, frogs, bats, dolphins/whales and other "border animals" to be liminal: "the wild duck and swan are cases in point...intermediate creatures that combine underwater activity and the bird flight with an intermediate, terrestrial life". Shamans and spiritual guides also serve as liminal beings, acting as "mediators between this and the other world; his presence is betwixt and between the human and supernatural." Many believe that shamans and spiritual advisers were born into their fate, possessing a greater understanding of and connection to the natural world, and thus they often live in the margins of society, existing in a liminal state between worlds and outside of common society. In
mythology and
religion or
esoteric lore liminality can include such realms as
Purgatory or
Da'at, which, as well as signifying liminality, some theologians deny actually existing, making them, in some cases, doubly liminal. "Between-ness" defines these spaces. For a hotel worker (an insider) or a person passing by with disinterest (a total outsider), the hotel would have a very different connotation. To a traveller staying there, the hotel would function as a liminal zone, just as "doors and windows and hallways and gates frame...the definitively liminal condition". More conventionally, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas—"a huge crater of an extinct volcano...[as] another symbol of transcendence"—fords, passes, crossroads, bridges, and marshes are all liminal: "'edges', borders or faultlines between the legitimate and the illegitimate". Oedipus met his father at the crossroads and killed him; the bluesman
Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads, where he is said to have sold his soul. In
architecture, liminal spaces are defined as "the physical spaces between one destination and the next." Common examples of such spaces include hallways, airports, and streets. In contemporary culture viewing the nightclub experience (dancing in a
nightclub) through the liminoid framework highlights the "presence or absence of opportunities for social subversion, escape from social structures, and exercising choice". This allows "insights into what may be effectively improved in hedonic spaces. Enhancing the consumer experience of these liminoid aspects may heighten experiential feelings of escapism and play, thus encouraging the consumer to more freely consume". The classic tale of
Cupid and Psyche serves as an example of the liminal in myth, exhibited through Psyche's character and the events she experiences. She is always regarded as too beautiful to be human yet not quite a goddess, establishing her liminal existence. Her marriage to Death in Apuleius' version occupies two classic Van Gennep liminal rites: marriage and death.—when he or she is both participating in the culture
and observing the culture. The researcher must consider the self in relation to others and his or her positioning in the culture being studied. In many cases, greater participation in the group being studied can lead to increased access of cultural information and greater in-group understanding of experiences within the culture. However increased participation also blurs the role of the researcher in data collection and analysis. Often a researcher that engages in fieldwork as a "participant" or "participant-observer" occupies a liminal state where he/she is a part of the culture, but also separated from the culture as a researcher. This liminal state of being betwixt and between is emotional and uncomfortable as the researcher uses self-reflexivity to interpret field observations and interviews. Some scholars argue that ethnographers are present in their research, occupying a liminal state, regardless of their participant status. Justification for this position is that the researcher as a "human instrument" engages with his/her observations in the process of recording and analyzing the data. A researcher, often unconsciously, selects what to observe, how to record observations and how to interpret observations based on personal reference points and experiences. For example, even in selecting what observations are interesting to record, the researcher must interpret and value the data available. To explore the liminal state of the researcher in relation to the culture, self-reflexivity and awareness are important tools to reveal researcher bias and interpretation.
In higher education For many students, the process of starting university can be seen as a liminal space. Whilst many students move away from home for the first time, they often do not break their links with home, seeing the place of origin as home rather than the town where they are studying.
Student orientation often includes activities that act as a
rite of passage, making the start of university as a significant period. This can be reinforced by the split of
town and gown, where local communities and the student body maintain different traditions and codes of behaviour. This means that many university students are no longer seen as school children, but have not yet achieved the status of independent adults. This creates an environment where risk-taking is balanced with
safe spaces that allow students to try out new identities and new ways of being within a structure that provides meaning. This liminal period offers a unique window of psychological malleability: disconnected from the secure attachments of home yet not having formed relationships that reinforce their sense of self, individuals in this transitional state can be particularly susceptible to influence—both constructive and harmful.
In popular culture Novels and short stories Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by
Chuck Palahniuk makes use of liminality in explaining time travel.
Possession by A. S. Byatt describes how
postmodern "Literary theory. Feminism...write about liminality. Thresholds. Bastions. Fortresses". Each book title in
The Twilight Saga speaks of a liminal period (
Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and
Breaking Dawn). In
The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), Milo enters "The Lands Beyond", a liminal place (which explains its topsy-turvy nature), through a magical tollbooth. When he finishes his quest, he returns, but changed, seeing the world differently. The giver of the tollbooth is never seen and name never known, and hence, also remains liminal. Liminality is a major theme in
Offshore by
Penelope Fitzgerald, in which the characters live between sea and land on docked boats, becoming liminal people.
Saul Bellow's "varied uses of liminality...include his
Dangling Man, suspended between civilian life and the armed forces" at "the onset of the dangling days". In her short story collection,
Tales From the Liminal (2021 Deuxmers), S. K. Kruse explores the potential transformative power of liminal times, places, and states of being.
Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre follows the protagonist through different stages of life as she crosses the threshold from student to teacher to woman. Her existence throughout the novel takes a liminal character. She can first be seen when she hides herself behind a large red curtain to read, closing herself off physically and existing in a paracosmic realm. At Gateshead, Jane is noted to be set apart and on the outside of the family, putting her in a liminal space in which she neither belongs nor is completely cast away. Jane's existence emerges as paradoxical as she transcends commonly accepted beliefs about what it means to be a woman, orphan, child, victim, criminal, and pilgrim, and she creates her own narrative as she is torn from her past and denied a certain future. Brooks states that Berridge's short stories provide "...a variety of violent, disaffected and often abject young people", characters who "...blur and often overturn" the boundaries between suburban and urban space. apart from their thematic relevance, directly and indirectly link the possibilities and potential of liminality in literature for developing characters, plots, and settings. The experiences and expressions of the in-between states of living 'betwixt and between' in a transitional world that intricately changes the constants and perpetuities of human life are eminent in the stories that are associated with the theoretical concepts such as permanent and temporary liminality, liminal space, liminal entity, liminoid, communitas, and anti-structure. The significance of liminality in the short stories is emphasised by conceptualising the existence of the characters as "living not here, not there – but somewhere in a space between here and there". In the play
Waiting for Godot for the entire length of the play, two men walk around restlessly on an empty stage. They alternate between hope and hopelessness. At times one forgets what they are even waiting for, and the other reminds him: "We are waiting for Godot". The identity of 'Godot' is never revealed, and perhaps the men do not know Godot's identity. The men are trying to keep up their spirits as they wander the empty stage, waiting.
Films and TV shows The Twilight Zone (1959–2003) is a US television anthology series that explores unusual situations between reality and the paranormal.
The Terminal (2004), is a US film in which the main character (Viktor Navorski) is trapped in a liminal space; since he can neither legally return to his home country Krakozhia nor enter the United States, he must remain in the airport terminal indefinitely until he finds a way out at the end of the film. In the film
Waking Life, about dreams, Aklilu Gebrewold talks about liminality.
Primer (2004), is a US science fiction film by Shane Carruth where the main characters set up their time travelling machine in a storage facility to ensure it will not be accidentally disturbed. The hallways of the storage facility are eerily unchanging and impersonal, in a sense depicted as outside of time, and could be considered a liminal space. When the main characters are inside the time travel box, they are clearly in temporal liminality. Yet another example comes from Hayao Miyazaki's
Princess Mononoke in which the Forest Spirit can only be killed while switching between its two forms.
Photography and Internet culture In the late 2010s, a trend of images depicting so-called "liminal spaces" surged in online art and photography communities, with the intent to convey "a sense of nostalgia, lostness, and uncertainty". The subjects of these photos may not necessarily fit within the usual definition of spatial liminality (such as that of hallways, waiting areas or rest stops) but are instead defined by a forlorn atmosphere and sentiments of abandonment, decay and quietness. Additionally, it has been suggested that the liminal space phenomenon could represent a broader feeling of disorientation in modern society, explaining the usage of places that are common in childhood memories (such as playgrounds or schools) as reflective about the passage of time and the collective experience of growing older. The phenomenon gained media attention in 2019, when a short
creepypasta originally posted to
4chan's /x/ board in 2019 went viral. The creepypasta showed an image of a hallway with yellow carpets and wallpaper, with a caption purporting that by "
noclipping out of bounds in real life", one may enter
the Backrooms, an empty wasteland of corridors with nothing but "the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in". Since then, a popular
subreddit titled "liminal space", cataloguing photographs that give a "sense that something is not quite right", has accrued over 500,000 followers. A
Twitter account called @SpaceLiminalBot posts many liminal space photos and it has accrued over 1.2 million followers. Liminal spaces can also be found in
painting and
drawing, for example in paintings by
Jeffery Smart. Research indicates that liminal spaces may appear eerie or strange because they fall into an
uncanny valley of architecture and physical places.
Music and other media Many videogames exist which are based on the aesthetic concept of liminal spaces. Examples include
Superliminal and the
video game adaptations of the Backrooms among many others.
Liminal Space is an album by American
breakcore artist Xanopticon.
Coil mention liminality throughout their works, most explicitly with the title of their song "Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)"
(sic) from their album
Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 2. In
.hack//Liminality Harald Hoerwick, the creator of the MMORPG "The World", attempted to bring the real world into the online world, creating a hazy barrier between the two worlds; a concept called "Liminality". In the lyrics of French rock band
Little Nemo's song "A Day Out of Time", the idea of liminality is indirectly explored by describing a transitional moment before the returning of "the common worries". This liminal moment is referred as timeless and, therefore, absent of aims and/or regrets. ==Liminoid experiences==