---
slug: nichols-initiation-3db6331f
title: "Nichols on Initiation"
author: "Sallie Nichols"
work: "Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey"
section: ""
year: "1980"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - initiation
fragment: |
  Such a terrible isolation or trial by endurance plays an important part in all initiation rites. Sometimes, for example, the initiate is forced to spend the night alone in a dark cave or forest. Here he must face and withstand possible physical death with no help but his own inner strength and resourcefulness. By facing this ordeal, the youth being tested is driven to find a new center, hitherto hidden within himself. If he survives this experience, he emerges indeed as one reborn, in token of which he is given a new name and accepted as an adult by the community.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Nichols is describing initiation, but the word that does the actual work is "forced." The candidate does not choose the cave; he is placed there. This distinction matters more than it first appears, because our instinct is to read the ordeal as a test of willpower — as if the night in the dark were a challenge to be met with sufficient resolve. That reading quietly imports the very self-sufficiency the cave is designed to destroy. The point is not that the youth endures by drawing on what he already has, but that what he already has is shown to be insufficient, and something else — hitherto hidden, as Nichols puts it — is forced to the surface precisely because everything else has run out.
  
  This is why the new name matters. The name given after the ordeal is not a reward; it is an acknowledgment that the person who entered is not the person who emerged. What crossed the threshold was an identity organized around existing resources, existing strategies for staying intact. What came out had been emptied of those resources long enough to discover something that does not depend on them. The community's recognition is not applause for surviving. It is an announcement that survival, in this case, required becoming someone the community had not yet met.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The new name is the detail worth pressing. Not a reward, not a certificate — a name, which is to say a new identity ratified by the community that watched you disappear and return. What the ordeal does, in this reading, is force the initiate past the personality assembled in childhood, the one that leans on parents and village and the familiar web of belonging, until something else — older, less borrowed — has to take the load. Edinger would call that something the Self making a first real claim on the ego. The community then confirms what the darkness already knew: this is a different person. The thought the rites seem to encode, and that psychology keeps rediscovering, is that the new center was never installed from outside — it had only been waiting for the old supports to fall away.
parent_id: Nichols_1980_Jung_and_Tarot_An_Archetypal__par0071
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Nichols writes:

> Such a terrible isolation or trial by endurance plays an important part in all initiation rites. Sometimes, for example, the initiate is forced to spend the night alone in a dark cave or forest. Here he must face and withstand possible physical death with no help but his own inner strength and resourcefulness. By facing this ordeal, the youth being tested is driven to find a new center, hitherto hidden within himself. If he survives this experience, he emerges indeed as one reborn, in token of which he is given a new name and accepted as an adult by the community.

— Sallie Nichols

Nichols is describing initiation, but the word that does the actual work is "forced." The candidate does not choose the cave; he is placed there. This distinction matters more than it first appears, because our instinct is to read the ordeal as a test of willpower — as if the night in the dark were a challenge to be met with sufficient resolve. That reading quietly imports the very self-sufficiency the cave is designed to destroy. The point is not that the youth endures by drawing on what he already has, but that what he already has is shown to be insufficient, and something else — hitherto hidden, as Nichols puts it — is forced to the surface precisely because everything else has run out.

This is why the new name matters. The name given after the ordeal is not a reward; it is an acknowledgment that the person who entered is not the person who emerged. What crossed the threshold was an identity organized around existing resources, existing strategies for staying intact. What came out had been emptied of those resources long enough to discover something that does not depend on them. The community's recognition is not applause for surviving. It is an announcement that survival, in this case, required becoming someone the community had not yet met.

---

Sallie Nichols · *Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey* · 1980