The word "master" is where the trouble starts. Jung offers initiation as a path toward self-possession, and the structure he names — submission, containment, liberation — is real enough as a description of how rites have always worked. But "master of himself" carries the pneumatic inheritance without apology: the fantasy that the soul, once properly organized, comes under governance. That fantasy is precisely what initiation rites have never actually delivered, which is why cultures kept repeating them. The submission is real; the liberation is provisional; the mastery is the story told afterward to make the ordeal coherent.

What initiation actually does — when it works, when it lands rather than decorates — is install the memory of containment as a counter-pressure to the soul's ordinary flight from itself. Not mastery. Not balance as stasis. Something more like a scar that knows pressure differently than the surrounding skin. The "conflicting elements" Jung names do not resolve into a struck balance; they remain in conflict, but the initiate has been inside the conflict long enough that the conflict stops being an emergency. That is a different claim, and a more honest one. The rite does not end the war. It changes what war the person can bear to be in.