We live in a time that constantly demands formal coherence, stable identities and immediate definitions. Language quickly tends to turn into belonging; experience becomes classified; symbols are reduced to ready-made interpretations. In this climate, whatever moves between different categories is easily perceived as ambiguous, incoherent or suspicious. Yet much of the deepest human experience emerges precisely within spaces of transition, zones of crossing and inner territories where something is transforming without yet fully belonging to a new form.

The Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner, while studying rites of passage in traditional societies, used the term “liminal” to indicate that intermediate phase in which ordinary identity is suspended. One no longer fully belongs to the previous condition, yet has not become stabilized in the next one. Turner understood that these threshold zones often possess an extraordinary symbolic and transformative intensity. Over time, the term acquired a much broader meaning, eventually describing not only specific rituals, but an actual mode of human experience.

There are, in fact, people who naturally live in a liminal condition and move through languages, cultures and symbolic systems without fully identifying with any single one of them. Not necessarily out of indecision or relativism, but because they simultaneously perceive multiple levels of reality. In some cases this sensitivity produces disorientation; in others it generates a particular capacity for mediation, translation and crossing.

Over the years, the work of Franco Santoro (FS) became associated with the terms astrology and shamanism, united from the very beginning in the expression “astroshamanism,” coined by him and publicly used for a long period of time. Later, these definitions were progressively abandoned, since they tended to generate automatic reactions, prejudicial interpretations and cultural caricatures that ended up obscuring the real core of the research. Even so, these associations continue to reappear today in search engines and media archives.

Despite this terminological distancing, some central elements of that work continue to be recognized by many people. Among them: the multidimensionality of human identity, analogical symbolism, the possibility of operating simultaneously on different perceptual levels, and the presence of multiple “tracks” of experience within individual and collective consciousness.

At the same time, given the profoundly liminal and shapeshifting nature of his path, FS can express himself through languages that may differ greatly from one another. This oscillation does not belong merely to a communicative strategy, but forms part of the experiential structure from which the research itself emerged.

This writing also emerges from that tension. Not in order to represent a new spiritual affiliation, but rather as a curatorial space dedicated to the preservation, reinterpretation and transmission of a body of research developed through different languages and through phases often very distant from one another. My function does not consist in transforming the path of FS into a coherent and immutable doctrine, but in keeping its underlying structure legible through transformations, apparent contradictions and continuous crossings.

For this reason Arbor Lucis considers liminality not as an abstract theory, but as a concrete condition of human experience. Certain figures naturally inhabit threshold territories: they move across different symbolic systems, modify languages, alter perceptual structures and learn to read reality simultaneously on multiple levels. In many traditions such figures have been associated with the pilgrim, the visionary, the shapeshifter and with what we define as the liminal mediator: a presence capable of moving between different worlds without reducing experience to a single interpretative code.

The concept of shapeshifting itself, present in numerous traditional cultures, can also be understood from this perspective. Not necessarily as something fantastical or spectacular, but as an experience of symbolic, perceptual and identity transformation.

Perhaps this is also why images such as the bridge, the desert, the pilgrimage, the labyrinth, the forest or the door continue to reappear in cultures very distant from one another. They do not merely describe external places, but inner states, mutations of consciousness and moments in which the old language can no longer contain what is emerging.

In an age dominated by increasingly polarized identities, liminal thought does not intend to abolish differences nor to confuse everything indiscriminately. Rather, it seeks to understand how different languages may be crossed without being immediately reduced to a single stable form.

It is within this threshold space that we place our work. Beyond its editorial and curatorial dimension, the project intends to create an experiential space dedicated to the concrete exploration of these themes through consultations, meetings, symbolic paths and moments of shared research.

The point of departure does not consist in adopting a prefabricated system, but in listening to the person, to the language through which experience seeks expression, and to the symbolic forms that emerge along the way.

Whenever possible, and compatibly with the present path of FS, these activities may be carried forward either by him or by individuals associated with his work and research. Alongside this, the work of collecting, rereading and republishing materials developed over the years also continues.

Those who recognize a resonance with these themes may contact Arbor Lucis at: info@institutum.org