Neumann is describing a pivot, not a liberation. The boy who enters the men's house leaves behind the chthonic, the phallic, the earth-damp weight of undifferentiated instinct, and what he receives in exchange is spirit — radiant, solar, capitate. The initiation anoints consciousness and calls it higher masculinity. There is no mistaking the trajectory: upward, away, toward light. This is the grammar of pneumatic preference being handed down as sacred inheritance, generation by generation, mystery cult by mystery cult, long before any philosopher gave it a name.

The problem is not that spirit appears. Spirit does appear in genuine intensification. The problem is that it appears at the counterpole — positioned explicitly against sexuality, body, chthon, as if the soul's depth were the thing that had to be left behind for the boy to become. When initiation teaches that, it does not cure suffering; it installs a strategy for not suffering that will run quietly beneath every subsequent aspiration toward the higher, the abstract, the transcendent. The initiated man may spend decades wondering why the light he received at such cost keeps failing to hold him. Neumann maps the structure faithfully. He does not yet hear it as a trap.