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.