Liminal being

Liminal beings are those that cannot easily be placed into a single category of existence. Associated with the threshold state of liminality, from Latin līmen, "threshold",[1] they represent and highlight the semi-autonomous boundaries of the social world.[2]

Chiron, half man, half horse: instructing Achilles

Liminal beings are naturally ambiguous, challenging the cultural networks of social classification.[3]

Liminal entities

The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner considered that liminal entities, such as those undergoing initiation rites, often appeared in the form of monsters, so as to represent the co-presence of opposites—high/low; good/bad—in the liminal experience.[4]

Liminal personas are structurally and socially invisible, having left one set of classifications and not yet entered another.[5] The social anthropologist Mary Douglas has highlighted the dangerous aspects of such liminal beings,[6] but they are also potentially beneficent. Thus we often find presiding over a ritual's liminal stage a semi-human shaman figure, or a powerful mentor with animal aspects, such as a centaur.[7]

Legendary

By extension, liminal beings of a mixed, hybrid nature appear regularly in myth, legend and fantasy. A legendary liminal being is a legendary creature that combines two distinct states of simultaneous existence within one physical body. This unique perspective may provide the liminal being with wisdom and the ability to instruct, making them suitable mentors, whilst also making them dangerous and uncanny.

Many beings in fantasy and folklore exist in liminal states impossible in actual beings:

Hybrids (two species):

Both human and spirit by blood:

Both human and vegetable:

Both alive and dead:

  • ghosts, among them Tiresias, the dead seer whom Odysseus consulted in the underworld, in the Odyssey. Tiresias also had been transformed into a woman and back into a man while living, and was blind as well as a seer.

Both human and machine:

Both human and alien:

gollark: If I were to make this it would just be a minimal Alpine install or something.
gollark: Unfortunately, this isn't one of those poorly blurred things where you can theoretically reconstruct it a bit.
gollark: No, I didn't.
gollark: This is sarcastic. It would not be useful.
gollark: Yes, I can really see the value of mining in your own browser with some indirection.

See also

References
  1. "liminal", Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. OED Online Oxforde 23, 2007.
  2. Musgrove, Frank (1977). Margins of the Mind. Taylor & Francis. p. 8.
  3. Nicholas, Dean A. (2009). The Trickster Revisited: Deception as a Motif in the Pentateuch. Peter Lang. p. 37.
  4. Alexander, J. C.; Seidman, S. (1990). Culture and Society. Cambridge. pp. 147–9.
  5. Quartier, Thomas (2007). Bridging the Gaps: An Empirical Study of Catholic Funeral Rites. LIT Verlag Münster. pp. 103–4.
  6. Hume, Llynne (2007). Portals: Opening Doorways to Other Realities Through the Senses. Berg. p. 110.
  7. Aniela Jaffe and Joseph Henderson, in C. G. Jung ed., Man and his Symbols (London 1968 p. 261-2 and p. 101
  8. [Gilmore, David D. (2012) Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 38-45]
  9. Lauretis, Teresa de (2008). Freud's Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film. Basingstoke. p. 119.
  10. Briggs, Katharine (1976). "Wizards". An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Boogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. New York: Pantheon Books. p. 440. ISBN 0-394-73467-X.

Further reading
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