RITES OF PASSAGE
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 4
Fall 1976
It is significant that the word rite comes from the same root as art and order. Like all real art, like the movements of sacred dances, ritual provides order, a pattern, a channel through which the energy of an event or a series of events can flow in an evolutionary process toward a larger meaning, or a new stage or level of life. It offers us ways in which our transitions may be illuminated, helped to move up to consciousness instead of falling into accident and chaos: made to make sense. It is a ladder or a bridge, like that of the Noh theater's stage, marking the slow and exact steps of a passage from one world to another, between our ordinary daily lives and another dimension of meaning which surrounds us and yet is a "mystery" because our eyes are closed to it.
But the bridge itself is not a mystery and the eyes must not be closed. What combination of long discipline and inspiration, what marriage of service and grace, produces the Noh actor, or indeed any real artist? The hero may be you or me, but only at the highest reaches of our most impossible possibility. The Symplegades were never traversed by accident or in a dream, but only in the most active instant of a perfect and present attention. The rite of passage demands our total participation. --from the editorial Focus
ARTICLES
THE LITURGY OF NOH
Frederick Franck
An exponent of the Zen of seeing expresses, in text and drawings, the wealth of feeling and wisdom that is communicated in the spare, rigorous performance of Noh
VOTING ON FAITH: MYTH AND RITUAL IN PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS
James Wolfe
How the ordeals of the hero, the myth of the king, and the rituals of power are still very much part of the way men are transformed into presidents and exercise their office
MYTH AND ARCHETYPE IN SCIENCE FICTION
Ursula K. Le Guin
Is science fiction a modern mythology? A lively, insightful inquiry by one of the most distinguished and discriminating sci-fi writers
THE DANGEROUS PASSAGE
D. M. Dooling
In a sense, symbols of passage are themselves rites of passage: an expansion on Coomaraswamy's seminal essay "Symplegades."
RITE OF PASSAGE
Two of the pupils and friends of Minor White who shared with him the days of his final passage present a sequence of his own images to depict the process as they experienced it, with their accompanying text.
REFLECTIONS ON ANCIENT FRIENDSHIP  Robert E. Meagher
An exploration of the difference between living in society and living in community, with an invitation to rediscover the meaning of friendship.
SPIRALLING INTO THE FUTURE: A Conversation with William Irwin Thompson
The author of Passages About Earth and founder of Lindisfarne conducts a spirited tour through past and future, showing how the new religious age he sees dawning will repeat structurally but not literally the dominant motifs of the great myths and religious traditions.
TANGENTS: Books in Review
HOW MYTHS DIE
Paul Jordan-Smith on Levi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology II
WESTERN SCIENCE / EASTERN WISDOM
Kenneth L. Phillips on Capra's The Tao of Physics
EPICYCLES: Traditional Stories from around the World
QUETZALCOATL Mesoamerican
THE ELK SKULL Native American
THE VOYAGE OF THE ARGO  Greek
TALES OF A DEMON: THE LOST SCIENCE  Indian
