Liminal Thinking is a discipline with deep and tangled roots that are not easily unraveled. Many people practice Liminal Thinking intuitively, or learn it from a mentor, but up until now this community has been a diffuse, distributed, disconnected population; a “community without a name.” One of the goals of this book is to provide a name, and a home, and a common language, for that community.
The word liminal means “a state, stage, or period of transition.” It derives from the Latin root limen, which means threshold. This root appears in the English words preliminary (an event preceding something important), subliminal (below the threshold of consciousness), and lintel (literally threshold).
The first use of the word “liminal” in English was by James Sully, a psychologist, in 1884:
“Among these problems [of consciousness] is that of the limit, threshold, or liminal intensity. A certain degree of stimulation is necessary to a sense-impression : this is known as the liminal intensity.”
The concept of liminality as a state of transition was developed by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, in the early 1900s, in his book, Le Rites de Passage (Rites of Passage). The concept was further developed by another anthropologist, Victor Turner, in the 1960s.
