Eliade is describing something the modern inheritor of this schema tends to miss entirely: the primitives were not promising escape from death, they were promising that death could be relocated — moved from the end of the line to the middle of it, where it might mean something. Suffering, death, resurrection as rite of passage means death is functional, not final. It clears ground. The profane life — the unexamined, unworked, continuous self — is what dies, and this dying is the condition of entrance, not its obstacle.

What is harder to sit with is how thoroughly this initiatory logic has been absorbed into spirituality as comfort rather than challenge. Contemporary death-and-rebirth rhetoric — transformation, letting go, becoming your higher self — borrows the schema while quietly removing the actual death. The profane life continues; only its texture is upgraded. The rite of passage becomes a rite of addition. Eliade's primitives would not recognize this as initiation at all. What they understood, and what the schema in its original form insists, is that something genuinely ends — not symbolically tidied away, but ended — and that the ending is not preliminary to the meaning, it is the meaning. Whether there is a new spiritual existence waiting on the other side is a secondary question. The death is primary.