What Is a Rite of Passage for Men? | The Men's Work Directory

Where the tradition comes from

Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep identified the three-part structure of rites of passage in 1909: separation, transition (or liminality), and incorporation. You leave the world you knew, you pass through a threshold experience that strips away the old identity, and you return changed — recognized by the community as having crossed into a new status.

Virtually every traditional culture had this structure for men. The specifics varied — fasting, testing, ceremony, isolation, elder guidance — but the shape was consistent. Boys were taken away from their mothers, subjected to an ordeal, and returned as men who had earned that designation through something real.

Robert Bly argued in Iron John that modern Western culture has abandoned this structure and has not replaced it with anything equivalent. Boys become men on paper — legally, at 18 — but there is no moment, no ordeal, no elder recognition. No one takes them through. The result, Bly argued, is a culture full of psychologically uninitiated men who remain boys in adult bodies, still seeking from women the validation that initiation was supposed to provide.

Richard Rohr made the same case in Adam's Return (2004), describing five truths that genuine male initiation teaches: life is hard, you are not that important, your life is not about you, you are not in control, and you are going to die. He argues that men who don't learn these through initiation spend their lives trying to avoid them, which is its own kind of lifelong suffering.

What modern rites of passage look like

The most recognized contemporary form is the vision quest or wilderness fast — a solo time in nature, preceded by a period of preparation and followed by a return and integration process. Bill Plotkin's Animas Valley Institute has been running wilderness rites of passage for four decades, drawing on both depth psychology and indigenous traditions. The structure follows van Gennep: separation from ordinary life, a threshold experience in nature, return with something new.

Illuman, co-founded by Richard Rohr, runs weekend and multi-day rites of passage using contemplative Christian frameworks and elder mentoring. Their model is explicitly intergenerational: older men facilitating younger men through a threshold experience, which Rohr identifies as itself a part of the gift to the elder.

Michael Meade's work with Mosaic Multicultural Foundation draws on mythology and storytelling as the container. His argument, made in Men and the Water of Life, is that the stories men tell determine what they believe is possible — and that mythology is a map for navigating precisely the passages that modern life no longer supports.

Retreats and intensive weekend programs — ManTalks, specific men's retreat programs — use condensed timeframes and group containers to create threshold experiences without the wilderness context. These work for many men, especially as an entry point. The deeper initiations tend to require more time and more genuine exposure.

Why it matters now

The case for contemporary rites of passage is not nostalgic. It is based on what happens to men who haven't had them. Bly described it as the 'soft male' — not weak in a contemptible way, but porous, seeking external validation, unable to hold boundaries or purpose with real conviction. Hollis in Under Saturn's Shadow describes men whose mothers' wounds shaped their psyches in ways they are still living out at fifty.

What initiation provides is a change in the operating framework. Before: the boy's needs are primary and the world is supposed to meet them. After: the man understands that he is part of something larger, that his survival is not guaranteed, and that his life has meaning only to the extent he brings it. That is not a lesson that comes from a book. It comes from experience that reorganizes the self.

Common Questions

Can a retreat weekend be a genuine rite of passage?

Yes, for some men. The structure matters more than the duration. What makes something a rite of passage is the threshold quality — you enter as one thing and exit as another, and that change is witnessed. A well-facilitated weekend can hold that. A week in the wilderness almost always can. The quality of facilitation is the key variable.

Is a rite of passage a spiritual experience?

It often is, but doesn't have to be in a religious sense. Most men who go through a genuine initiation describe a quality of encounter — with themselves, with something larger, with mortality — that doesn't fit neatly into secular language. Whether you frame that as spiritual is up to you.

Is this just for young men?

No. Rohr writes about second-half-of-life initiation for men in midlife and beyond. Plotkin's framework describes multiple initiatory passages through a life. The threshold crossing from the first half of life to the second is, for many men, the most consequential initiation they ever undergo — and one that can happen at any age.