---
slug: neumann-initiation-087ba5c5
title: "Neumann on Initiation"
author: "Erich Neumann"
work: "The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton"
section: ""
year: "2019"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - initiation
fragment: |
  The goal of all initiation, however, from the rites of puberty to the religious mysteries, is transformation. In all of them the higher spiritual man is begotten. But this higher man is the man possessed of consciousness or, as liturgical language expresses it, of the higher consciousness. In him, man experiences his fellowship with a spiritual and heavenly world. Whether this fellowship takes the form of an apotheosis, or the initiate becomes one of God's children, or a sol invictus, or the hero becomes a star or an angel among the heavenly host, or whether he identifies himself with the totem ancestors, is all one. Always he enters into an alliance with heaven, with light and wind, cosmic symbols of the spirit that is not of this earth, bodiless and the enemy of the body.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Neumann is describing initiation as though the goal were self-evident — transformation toward a "higher spiritual man" — but what he is actually mapping, without quite saying so, is the logic of the ascent itself: if I am spiritual enough, I will not suffer. Every form he lists here, apotheosis, the sun-child, the stellar hero, the ancestral totem, converges on the same motion: away from the body, away from the earth, toward light, wind, the bodiless. The phrase "enemy of the body" does the most honest work in the passage, and Neumann places it almost in passing, as description rather than diagnosis.
  
  The trouble is that initiation rites were not always escape routes. The puberty rites that anthropologists have recovered in the most detail are somatic ordeals — scarification, isolation, ordeal, dismemberment imagery — in which the body is not transcended but broken open. Something of that brutality has been sublimated here into "higher consciousness," and the sublimation is the thing worth noticing. What Neumann calls the goal of all initiation is actually one goal, the pneumatic one, the one the tradition remembered most fondly. The other initiations — the ones that ended in the body, not above it — left fewer liturgies behind, and that silence is not neutral.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The phrase "enemy of the body" lands hard — and Neumann knows it. He does not soften it, because the initiation traditions he is cataloguing genuinely meant it: the point of the rite was to loosen the candidate from identification with flesh, weight, earth. What shifts across every variant he lists — apotheosis, stellar transformation, adoption into the divine family — is costume only; the underlying logic is always the same departure from the somatic. Hillman would press back here, insisting that soul-making requires the body, not escape from it, and that Neumann's long developmental arc still secretly privileges ascent over descent. That tension is worth holding. But Neumann's real observation cuts deeper than a preference for sky over ground: he is pointing to the structural grammar of transformation itself, the way every tradition seems compelled to stage a death of one identity before any new one can be born. The question the passage leaves open is whether the "heavenly alliance" is the destination, or only what the initiate calls the feeling of having finally shed something he could not carry.
parent_id: Neumann_2019_The_Origins_and_History_of__par0118
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Neumann writes:

> The goal of all initiation, however, from the rites of puberty to the religious mysteries, is transformation. In all of them the higher spiritual man is begotten. But this higher man is the man possessed of consciousness or, as liturgical language expresses it, of the higher consciousness. In him, man experiences his fellowship with a spiritual and heavenly world. Whether this fellowship takes the form of an apotheosis, or the initiate becomes one of God's children, or a sol invictus, or the hero becomes a star or an angel among the heavenly host, or whether he identifies himself with the totem ancestors, is all one. Always he enters into an alliance with heaven, with light and wind, cosmic symbols of the spirit that is not of this earth, bodiless and the enemy of the body.

— Erich Neumann

Neumann is describing initiation as though the goal were self-evident — transformation toward a "higher spiritual man" — but what he is actually mapping, without quite saying so, is the logic of the ascent itself: if I am spiritual enough, I will not suffer. Every form he lists here, apotheosis, the sun-child, the stellar hero, the ancestral totem, converges on the same motion: away from the body, away from the earth, toward light, wind, the bodiless. The phrase "enemy of the body" does the most honest work in the passage, and Neumann places it almost in passing, as description rather than diagnosis.

The trouble is that initiation rites were not always escape routes. The puberty rites that anthropologists have recovered in the most detail are somatic ordeals — scarification, isolation, ordeal, dismemberment imagery — in which the body is not transcended but broken open. Something of that brutality has been sublimated here into "higher consciousness," and the sublimation is the thing worth noticing. What Neumann calls the goal of all initiation is actually one goal, the pneumatic one, the one the tradition remembered most fondly. The other initiations — the ones that ended in the body, not above it — left fewer liturgies behind, and that silence is not neutral.

---

Erich Neumann · *The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton* · 2019