For most of human history, becoming a man was not something that simply happened with age. It was marked. A boy was taken out of the ordinary world, tested, and welcomed back changed – and recognised by his elders as a man. Almost every culture had a version of this. Most of ours have quietly lost it.
Without that marker, a lot of men are left guessing. We reach adulthood by default rather than by initiation, and many carry a quiet, unspoken question well into midlife: am I actually the man I meant to become? That question is not a weakness. It is the sound of a step that never got taken.
The three stages of a rite of passage
The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep described every true rite of passage as having three movements. They are worth knowing, because they are exactly what modern life leaves out:
- Separation. You leave the familiar – your roles, your routines, your phone – and step out of ordinary time.
- The threshold. You face something real, alongside other men going through it too. This is where the old self loosens its grip.
- The return. You come home carrying something you did not have before, and you are witnessed and welcomed by men who saw the change.
A weekend cannot hand a man his whole life. But a genuine rite of passage can give him the one thing the modern world rarely does: a clear, embodied line between who he was and who he is choosing to become, and a circle of men who witnessed him cross it.
That is exactly what the New Warrior Training Adventure is built to be – a modern rite of passage, held safely, for men who sense there is more.
The NWTA is for men aged 18 and over. If it is a younger man you have in mind, Aotearoa has dedicated rites-of-passage journeys for teenage boys and their fathers through Tracks, the Rites of Passage Foundation.
The three-stage framework of rites of passage comes from the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (The Rites of Passage, 1909). Its revival in modern men’s work owes much to Robert Bly’s Iron John, part of the lineage the ManKind Project grew from.