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.