Purpose: This study analyzes rites associated with healing and misfortune averting in Iranian folk culture, focusing on their relationship with acts of passage and rites of passage. The central question is how healing and misfortune averting rituals, when accompanied by an act of passage or a change of status, operate through mechanisms and how these mechanisms relate to the structure of rites of passage. Drawing on Arnold van Gennep’s theory of rites of passage and Victor Turner’s elaboration of liminality, together with James Frazer’s theory of sympathetic magic, the study seeks to distinguish physical passage from ritual passage and from a structured rite of passage.



Methodology: The study employs documentary research and qualitative content analysis. Data were extracted from sources on Iranian folk culture, including ethnographic texts, anthropological reports, and studies of healing and misfortune averting rituals. The analytical corpus consists of 24 ritual cases; repeated accounts or different reports of the same practice were not counted as separate cases. Each case was examined according to its ritual elements, type of passage, and change in status before and after the ritual. The cases were coded, compared, and organized into analytical categories. Van Gennep, Turner, and Frazer were used as theoretical sources rather than as documentary data.



Results: The analysis shows that physical passage, ritualized acts of passage, and rites of passage are analytically distinct. In some cases, passing through a material or spatial medium, such as fire, an opening, or an animal skin, functions within practices of misfortune averting, purification, transfer, or protection and does not necessarily constitute a rite of passage. Where an identifiable change of status and a passage structure can be established, such acts can be interpreted through separation, liminality, and incorporation. The laws of similarity and contagion also help explain the logic of some practices, including the symbolic transfer of illness or misfortune to a substitute carrier and the use of similarity to produce a desired transformation.



Conclusion: Healing and misfortune averting rituals in Iranian folk culture should therefore not be treated as a uniform category of rites of passage, but as a range of symbolic practices, some of which are structurally connected to passage. The principal contribution of the study is to distinguish three analytical levels: physical passage, the symbolic mechanism of passage, and the structure of a rite of passage. A passage becomes an element of a rite of passage only when it is accompanied by an identifiable change of status and structural features. This distinction enables a more precise use of van Gennep’s and Turner’s concepts while showing that Frazer’s laws of similarity and contagion can illuminate healing and misfortune averting practices independently of a complete rite-of-passage structure.