Eliade is describing initiation as the original technology of self-transcendence, and it is worth pausing on how much of that technology survives in forms we no longer call sacred. The logic is identical wherever it appears: ordinary life is insufficient, the natural self is incomplete, and transformation requires passage through death into something higher. Modernity did not invent this hunger — it inherited it, stripped it of ritual form, and scattered it across therapy, self-help, spiritual practice, and the vocabulary of the "authentic self." What Eliade calls the primitive's superhuman ideal returns in every programme that promises to move you from who you merely are to who you were meant to become.

The trap is not in the death-and-rebirth structure itself, which is genuinely archaic and genuinely powerful. The trap is in what is being abolished. When initiation works, what dies is a specific attachment — to childhood dependencies, to an earlier economy of desire. When it gets captured by spiritual bypass, what is being abolished is feeling itself: the mess of the natural level, the body's record of everything that has already happened to it. The higher life becomes a way out of soul rather than a deepening of it. The ritual container held the death so that something particular could end. Remove the container and the death becomes general — a project of becoming, always incomplete, never landing.