Initiation

The ritual passage through symbolic death to rebirth that organizes puberty rites, entrance into secret societies, heroic myth, and — in secularized forms — the transformations of the modern inner life. For Eliade, initiation is pan-cultural and structurally uniform. The candidate is swallowed by a monster, buried in the earth, enclosed in the initiatory hut as maternal womb, or otherwise returned to a prenatal condition, so that he may be born a second time. “The initiatory hut symbolizes the maternal womb; the novice’s symbolic death signifies a regression to the embryonic state” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). “In the monster’s belly there is cosmic night; it is the embryonic mode of existence, both on the cosmic plane and the plane of human life” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957).

The symbolism is cosmogonic as well as biological. “To be cured, the victim of an illness must be brought to a second birth, and the archetypal model of birth is the cosmogony. The work of time must be undone, the auroral moment immediately preceding the Creation must be reintegrated” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). Initiation is therefore the phenomenological ancestor of what the depth tradition names individuation: a death to the old form that makes room for the true form to be born.

The classical root is present in Eliade’s own citation of Socrates: “Sacred knowledge and, by extension, wisdom are conceived as the fruit of an initiation … Socrates had good reason to compare himself to a midwife, for in fact he helped men to be born to consciousness of self; he delivered the ‘new man’” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957).

Relationships

• katabasis
• individuation
• sacred-time
• hero-journey

Primary sources

• eliade-sacred-and-profane (Eliade 1957)