Limen

limen

Threshold, lintel, doorway. Architecture first. Anthropology centuries later.

Etymology

Latin līmen: threshold, lintel, doorway. English liminal is a scholarly derivative. Van Gennep (1909) used the Latin to name a ritual phase. Turner developed liminality and communitas later. The Latin word is not the theory.

Historical usage

Roman usage is architectural and ritual: the boundary of a house, a city, a sacred precinct.

Later development

Van Gennep’s limen is the middle phase of a rite of passage (1909). Turner’s liminality (1960s) is a further development. Contemporary liminal spaces is later still. They are not Homeric terms and not universal psychic laws.

Why it matters here

A threshold is a place where status is unstable. Keep the Latin word when you mean that architecture or that ritual theory, and say which.

Stories that hold this word

Relationship type is not optional

A word present in a source text is not the same as a later critical term applied to that story.

Later critical term
The Odyssey
Later anthropological term applied to washings, disguises, and the bed as incorporation.
Later critical term
The Camino
Turner later wrote on Christian pilgrimage. Not the pilgrims’ own Latin for the walk.

Later critical term
The Odyssey
Later critical term
The Camino