For me, it wasn't really a ritual so much as my father pulling me aside one day and saying: "Dan, you're 18, you're a man now, and I can't tell you what to do. But I hope you will listen to my years of experience and take what wisdom you can." In essence he let loose the reigns of responsibility, and let me know that I was responsible for my own life. Of course, it was many years till I started ACTING like a man.

"What is the essence" of it seems like one of those questions that can lead deeper into the question itself, rather than to an answer. Which is great, but I won't try to offer my 2c on that, because of its personal and non-verbal nature.

Rather, I will say that I feel the _context_ of the experience has changed from the "rigorous or symbolic rites of passage" of "cultures past". Even our own culture used to be way more rigorous and serious about its symbols, but that seems to have been steadily breaking down for a while now. It's become commonplace to question the traditional forms and formats of just about any experience. While I (and I suspect many others around here) generally welcome this, it does create the situation Doshinto is talking about, the absence of clear (working) rituals held sacred by the whole society.

Instead, many of us coalesce in small, decentralized groups of seekers to find this or that experience, this or that "trial". Even a strictly individual approach to initiation -- a breaking out of cultural neural programming to make one's own maps, not necessarily through anybody else's guidance -- is emerging, with its new risks and possibilities. Clear-cut distinctions blur and old icons lose their sacredness; surrounded by a "global village" that remixes and contaminates our cultural identities, we are being forced to question accepted rituals, and allow new ones to emerge from within.

The We in the question "Where do we draw the line" is evaporating into billions of I's... or is it just Me? :)

I feel that americans have no real rites of manhood that are truly effective or meaningful. if you look at aboriginal cultures, boys become men at a way earlier age, and are not give any leeway to fuck around. here, we give our children shiny noisy crap to "teach" them, but this just pacifies them. then, they are allowed to be immature, disrespectful, ignorant messes that have no sense of responsibilty toward their elders, their community or themselves, and it is excused because "they are growing up and learning". bullshit. when i read about a 10 year old in australia and new guinea that has been scarred or subjected to insect bites, or fire or fasting... or whatever, and when they are done THEY ARE A MAN AT 10 and there is no time for mistakes, and they act like men and live like men THAT IS AN INITIATION! they take care of themselves and their families from that point on and they have respect for themselves, their families, their community, nature, sprituaality----this is what we lack and why our society is failing.

good article on the role of violence in this - and the need men have for structured violence, indigenous model. also good aboriginal rite of passage activity recommended. at aboriginalrights.suite101.com/art...htoh