Fantasy Freaks & Gaming Geeks

[davem]

Originally Posted by alatar

What, considering our cultures, is our right of passage, especially for males? Where is the vision quest, the challenge, the coming/passing through? How does the lack of official said right of passage affect us as persons and as a culture?

We don't really have a 'culture' to be initiated into, or any kind of cultural identity - just the silly fantasy versions constructed by Nationalist groups. Hence, a rite of passage in the older sense is impossible. Of course, there will always be individual "rites of passage" - first job, first sex, marriage, birth of your first child, etc, etc. And for the religious there is the Bar Mitzvah, or Confirmation, so I don't think we are entirely without the rituals of transition/integration - they simply have a different form.

Yet, the existence of Archetypal figures/events, particularly in fantasy/fairy stories, & the familiarity of these figures & events, seems to point to a mythical substrate to our lives - the schoolchildren using those story cards seemed perfectly at home with figures like The Younger Son & The Man in the Moon. They are beings of the imagination - but of the collective rather than individual consciousness. What I don't know is to what extent our response to Tolkien is to do with these 'shared' images/situations, ie the 'Archetypal' dimension - which may possibly account for the sense of 'recognition' we feel on encountering Middle-earth.