Van Gennep took every rite of passage he could find and showed they have the same three parts. Separation: you are removed from what you were. Margin: you are nothing, held in a condition with no name, neither the old thing nor the new one. Aggregation: you are returned, and given the new name, and it holds.

The middle part is the limen. The sill. It is meant to be brief and it is meant to be survived. In the ethnography it lasts a night, a season, a winter in the bush. Everyone in it is equal, because none of them are anything.

Turner’s addition was to notice that the margin can be occupied. That there are people, and eventually whole societies, who do not complete the third phase and do not return, and for whom the threshold stops being a passage and becomes an address.

A permanent liminality. A rite that has separated everyone and aggregated no one.

This is the correct description of the present, and it is why the transhumanists cannot find their event. They are watching for aggregation — the moment of the new name, the crossing that resolves — and there is no third phase scheduled. The ceremony was cancelled some time in the middle of the last century and nobody was told, because there is nobody left outside the rite to tell us.

We are not becoming something. We are living on the sill. The sill has furniture in it now, and a postal service, and an economy, and children who were born here and find the word threshold merely decorative.