The Science of Liminal Space

One of the things my Winds of Chaos guest character Yfema is best known for is her obsession with liminal space. She has a propensity for jumping between worlds and being aware of anachronisms. So it makes a certain amount of sense that she knows a touch about alternate dimensions and astral projection. (Or at least, she acts like she does.)

It is entirely a coincidence that my latest project, titled Ghost Path, also deals with liminal space. Actually, it is the ultimate cosmic junkyard, created from the fabric of the universe to deal with those things that are too bizarre to be allowed to exist elsewhere. But certainly it qualifies as a space that it is ‘other.’

Everything within it feels, at first, as if it should be perfectly normal. But it is revealed to be off in some way upon closer examination. It borders the edges of all other spaces within the universe. Yet the things within it are not meant to cross over or mesh with things in saner cosmic spaces. Most travelers to this dimension arrive alone and confused. Though there are plenty of groups of other lost travelers within the space to explain its odd behavior.

We all have some innate understanding of liminal space (even if we don’t know the name of it). And in fact most cultures have some form of mythology surrounding it. But what is liminal space? And why does it seem so easy to comprehend even if you’ve never heard much about it before?

Liminality

Born from the Latin root word “limen” (which means threshold), liminality is an anthropologic term that describes the ambiguity and disorientation that occurs in the middle of a rite of passage. While participants are in the middle of these rituals, they have abandoned their pre-ritual status but have not yet assumed their post-ritual status.

They occupy a threshold, a space in between.

The concept of liminality was first coined by Arnold Van Gennep in 1909. But more recently, the term has broadened to describe political and cultural changes as well. According to its wikipedia page, “during liminal periods, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved. Continuity of tradition may become uncertain and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. This dissolution of order creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.”

Liminal periods are both destructive and constructive, with the chaos caused by the original breakdown allowing for the rearranging of social structures.

Liminality can apply to a wide array of situations. It covers moving from one status to another. Moving from one place to another. Or even moving from one year to another. Likewise, liminality can exist on a personal scale but can also encompass a region or even an entire civilization.

Liminal Space

If liminality represents the threshold between states of being, then liminal space logically represents spaces that occupy the threshold between two other spaces. These transitional spaces include hotel hallways, gas stations, and the most common liminal space: crossroads. Liminal spaces also tend to appear eerie, forlorn or surreal. One of the pillars of liminal space tends to be the absence of other people, making most liminal experiences solitary.

Liminal spaces are temporal. They occupy the space between use and disuse and between the past and present. Liminal spaces are almost always open, almost always available in some way. But usually they are only used for a certain period of time, leaving them open to intersection during the hours normal people aren’t using them.

You can think of liminal space as a space that is open and welcoming not just to humans on our plane of existence but to spirits and fae creatures that may come from other realms. While we make wide use of them, liminal spaces may feel perfectly normal. But in their off hours it’s impossible to say what might make use of them. And entering the space during those off hours can be eerie and disconcerting.

Liminal Time

During a recent episode of Winds of Chaos, the party experienced a small bit of time travel. When they spoke to a character who was meeting them for the first time, but that they had met several times before, to ask where they were, my husband blurted: liminal time. He told me later that he wasn’t sure why. It was a term he had never heard. But it made perfect sense.

If liminal space represents an intersection of transitional locations, then liminal time surely represents an intersecton of times. A transition between one time period and another. My husband told me after the episode that he was thinking of how you calculate the midpoint between spaces. And once you’ve calculated the first midpoint, you calculate the new midpoint based on the old one. As a result, there is always space between your two endpoints. They can never actually touch.

And into that non-space, he said, is where you put infinite space.

Interestingly enough, when I started doing research for this blog, I discovered that liminal time is an actual thing. The best example is twilight, which serves as the transition between day and night. Incidentally this is also where the Twilight Zone got its name. From space, the twilight zone is actually observable as a place where daylight and shadow advance and retreat across the globe.

Other common examples of liminal time include equinoxes and solstices. When the length of days and nights begin to increase or decrease. This also makes New Years day a liminal space, as well as birthdays.

In Conclusion

Remember when I said that every culture has some concept of liminal space? In mythology, there are numerous examples of liminality. Lleu from Welsh mythology, could not be killed during day or night, indoors nor outdoors, riding nor walking, clothed nor naked. But they were attacked at dusk while wrapped in a net with one foot on a cauldron and one on a goat.

In Egyptian mythology, Ra decreed that Nuit, the goddess of the sky, would never be able to give birth during any day of the year. Because he believed one of her children would eventually kill him. So Nuit gambled with the god of the moon in order to gain enough light to create 5 extra days on which she birthed each of her children.

Limbo is another common mythological liminal space, sometimes considered the threshold between life and death and sometimes the threshold between worlds. Purgatory is another liminal space in which dwell the people who have not been assigned to hell but have also not yet made it into heaven.

One might even suggest the existence of liminal beings in the form of ghosts or spirits, as they occupy the space between life and death.

Of course, I had no idea how deep the concept of liminality went when I came up with the cosmic junkyard around which Ghost Path centers. But it’s pretty neat to know that a lot of people have dug through a lot of rabbit holes in order to quantify these concepts.

It’s going to make it even more fun to play around with them!