It is clear that with initiation everything begins anew. Sometimes the symbolism of the second birth is expressed by concrete gestures. Among some Bantu peoples, before being circumcised the boy is the object of a ceremony called "being born again." His father sacrifices a ram and three days later wraps the boy in the animal's stomach membrane and skin. Just before this is done, the boy must get into bed and cry like an infant. He remains in the ramskin for three days. The same peoples bury their dead in ramskins and in the fetal position. The symbolism of mystical rebirth by ritually donning the skin of an animal is also attested in highly evolved cultures. In the scenarios of initiations the symbolism of birth is almost always found side by side with that of death. In initiatory contexts death signifies passing beyond the profane, unsanctified condition, the condition of the natural man," who is without religious experience, who is blind to spirit. The mystery of initiation gradually reveals to the novice the true dimensions of existence; by introducing him to the sacred, it obliges him to assume the responsibility that goes with being a man.
— Mircea Eliade
Eliade is describing something the modern world has mostly lost the nerve to perform: the formal acknowledgment that the self which entered the threshold cannot be the self that exits it. The ramskin is not metaphor — it is literal enclosure, literal helplessness, the novice required to cry like an infant because something in him genuinely is an infant again. The burial position of the dead and the fetal position of the newly wrapped boy share the same geometry deliberately. Eliade's point is that death and birth are not opposite poles of a single journey but the same event approached from different directions.
What the passage does not say, but opens: initiation works precisely because the novice has no agency inside the ramskin. He cannot perform his way into the new condition. The three days are not a program; they are an exposure. The "natural man" Eliade describes — the one who is blind to spirit — is not blind from lack of effort but from the specific effort of keeping the profane condition intact, which includes keeping the self recognizable to itself. Initiation interrupts that maintenance. The question the passage leaves hanging is what happens in cultures where the ramskin ceremony is gone and the interruption must come from somewhere else — and whether what substitutes for it carries the same willingness to not emerge unchanged.
Mircea Eliade·The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion·1957