Eliade is watching a shaman strip away everything — flesh, muscle, identity, the accumulated tissue of a life — until only bone remains. The skeleton is not death's residue; it is the irreducible, the structure beneath every story the body tells about itself. What he calls "re-entering the womb of primordial life" is really this: that when nothing survivable survives, when every strategy for remaining intact has been dissolved, something prior becomes briefly visible. Not recovered, not restored — briefly visible.

The pull of this image is exactly what needs watching. It carries the logic of the mystic renewal: *if I descend far enough, I will emerge renewed*. Rebirth is a pneumatic promise, and Eliade's framing cooperates with it — "mystical," "complete," "renewal." The shaman's tradition does not actually promise return in any form the initiate would recognize. The descent to bone is the price of a particular kind of knowing, not the coin purchased with that price. What comes back from the skeleton condition has been in the bones all along; what does not come back is the flesh that was certain it would.