Initiation

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Initiation is a rite that admits a person into a group, a mystery, or a degree of knowledge — and that is held, by those who practice it, to leave the initiate not merely informed but altered. The word comes from the Latin initium, a beginning; the thing it names is older than any language that has a word for it. A boy is taken into the bush and a man walks back out. A candidate kneels at a lodge door blindfolded and rises a brother. A soul, in the Platonic figure, turns from shadow toward the light and is said to have been admitted to the final mystery. The forms differ past all reconciling; the conviction beneath them is constant — that some thresholds cannot be crossed by learning about them, only by being carried across.

The shape of the passage

The pattern is among the most widely attested in the study of human cultures, and it was given its enduring description early in the twentieth century. The ethnographer Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957), in Les Rites de passage (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909), proposed that the rituals attending every change of state — birth, puberty, betrothal and marriage, accession to office, death, the turning of the seasons — share a single tripartite form. He named the three moments rites de séparation, rites de marge, and rites d’agrégation: separation from one’s former condition, a marginal or threshold phase outside ordinary status, and reincorporation under a new identity. The schema was meant as descriptive economy, a way to compare rites across cultures without the evolutionary ranking that had organized James Frazer’s comparative project a generation earlier. Van Gennep was explicit that the three phases are not equally weighted in every rite: in funerals separation predominates, in marriage aggregation, and in initiation the marginal phase swells until it dominates the whole. He worked at the edge of French academic life, holding no university chair, clashing with the Durkheimian school over its systematizing of social facts; the 1909 book was met with near silence. Its later authority is a recovery, carried out by other hands across the middle of the century.

What the structure describes is a person taken apart and put back together. In the separating phase the candidate is stripped of marks of former status — clothing, name, hair, rank — and removed from the company that knew him by them. In the threshold phase he is, in the phrase that became standard, betwixt and between: neither what he was nor yet what he will be, suspended in a condition that ordinary social categories cannot hold. The symbols that crowd this middle phase across the world’s rites are remarkably consistent — darkness, nakedness, mud and ashes, masks, monstrous and composite figures, silence, the inversion of rank and sex, the treatment of the candidate as dead or unborn. Then comes reincorporation: the threshold is closed behind the candidate, who returns bearing a status, a name, a knowledge, or a mark that he did not carry in. He is counted, by those who received him, as something he was not before.

Death and rebirth

The marginal phase, examined closely, is very often staged as a death. The candidate is buried, swallowed, dismembered, sent into the underworld, declared a corpse, or hidden where the living do not go; from that figured death he is born a second time. The pattern is so widespread that it became the organizing claim of the historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), whose Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture (New York: Harper, 1958; reissued as Rites and Symbols of Initiation, 1965) gathered Australian age-grade rites, the dismemberment visions of Siberian practitioners, and the regeneration language of Hermetic and alchemical texts under one reading. For Eliade the candidate’s symbolic death is a return to the formlessness before creation, the threshold a re-entry into the time of origins, and the new birth an emergence into a different mode of being — so that initiation, in his telling, is the ritual repetition of the world’s own making. The reading carries the freight of his larger system: the hierophany or irruption of the sacred into ordinary time, the eternal return to a primordial pattern, the figure of an archaic religiosity that modernity has masked but not erased.

This synthesis is read now with care, and the caution is part of the subject. The historian Jonathan Z. Smith argued that Eliade’s recurring “patterns” were artifacts of selection and translation rather than features found in the data — that the morphology of the sacred was the morphology Eliade brought to it (Map Is Not Territory, Chicago, 1978; Imagining Religion, 1982). The critique extends to van Gennep’s heirs generally: a tripartite arc, a sacred center, an archaic wholeness, each carries normative weight inherited from the ritual traditions on which its theorists were formed. The death-and-rebirth figure is real and recurrent; whether it expresses one cross-cultural sacred reality, or names a family of ritual moves that different peoples mean very differently, is exactly the question the comparative study of initiation has learned not to settle in advance.

Liminality and the threshold

It was Victor Turner (1920–1983) who made van Gennep’s middle phase the center of the inquiry. Working from fieldwork among the Ndembu of what was then Northern Rhodesia, Turner took the marge and renamed it liminality (from the Latin limen, threshold), arguing in The Forest of Symbols (Cornell, 1967) and The Ritual Process (Aldine, 1969) that the liminal phase generates a distinctive mode of human relation he called communitas: an unstructured, levelling, charged condition of equality that stands against the graded hierarchies — the “structure” — of ordinary life. The initiands secluded together, stripped of rank and reduced to a common nakedness, form for a season an intense fellowship that the everyday order does not permit; initiation, on this reading, is the institution by which a society periodically produces this anti-structure and folds it back into its own reproduction. The candidate is neither child nor adult, neither dead nor living, and the monstrous and inverting symbols of the threshold are the technologies that mark and exploit that suspension.

Turner’s reach beyond initiation proper is what gave the framework its long life. He extended liminality to pilgrimage, theater, monasticism, millenarian movements, and the counterculture of his own decade, distinguishing the liminal — bound into a sequence and aimed at re-aggregation — from the liminoid, the optional and marginal threshold-experiences characteristic of complex modern societies, their leisure, art, and performance. The distinction bears directly on the modern esoteric orders, whose initiations claim the structural seriousness of the liminal while occurring inside the voluntary associations of the liminoid. The critical literature treats Turner more fondly than it treats Eliade, but not without reservation: the medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum showed that his symbol-readings consistently presuppose a male protagonist, and communitas has been charged with romanticizing what is often a coercive and sharply gendered ordeal.

A further turn made the apparatus itself visible. The ritual theorist Catherine Bell argued in Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992) that “ritual” — and “initiation” as a sub-category of it — is not a natural kind discovered in the world but a theoretical construction that has organized a tradition of inquiry while concealing its own commitments. On her account the useful question is not what is initiation? but what the framing of certain practices as initiation accomplishes — what authority it constitutes, what selves it produces, what distinctions it enforces, and for whom. This does not dissolve the rites; it disciplines the study of them, allowing the analyst to take seriously what a tradition claims its initiation does without either endorsing or debunking the metaphysics.

The ancient mysteries

In the ancient Mediterranean the word for initiation, and the institutions that most fully embodied it, belonged to the mystery cults. The Greek term was teletē — a rite of completion or fulfillment, wider in range than the modern word “initiation” that translates it. At Eleusis, for well over a millennium, those admitted to the rites of Demeter and Persephone walked the Sacred Way some twenty kilometers from Athens, fasted in memory of the grieving goddess, kept the night vigil, and in the great hall, the Telesterion, were brought from sustained darkness to a sudden blaze of light. They were sworn to silence about what was shown, and the silence held: the central content is genuinely lost, the one durable secret of the ancient world. What the rite was for, on the testimony of those who left any, was a better lot beyond death — the initiate had, in some sense, rehearsed dying and returned. The mysteries of Isis, reconstructed in part from the veiled first-person account in Apuleius, the grade-marked cult of Mithras with its seven ascending degrees, the rites of the Great Mother and of Samothrace — each had its ordeals, its fasting and fear, its sudden epiphany. The Aristotelian formula preserved by later writers caught the principle exactly: the initiate is not to learn something but to undergo something and to be brought into a state.

The philosophers borrowed the vocabulary and turned it inward. In the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions the soul’s ascent toward the Good is figured as a teletē, the purifications as lesser mysteries and the final vision as the epopteia, the highest seeing reserved for the fully initiated. Proclus and the theurgists of late antiquity went further, holding that the soul’s union with the divine operates not by reasoning but by ritual presence, by theurgy — a position that placed real rite, not argument, at the summit of the philosophical life. The Hermetic dialogue on rebirth, in Corpus Hermeticum XIII, casts the disciple’s regeneration in just this initiatory key, a death of the old self and birth of a divine one transmitted from teacher to pupil.

The early-twentieth-century reconstructions through which the mysteries entered modern imagination — Franz Cumont on Mithras, Richard Reitzenstein on the Hellenistic mystery-religions, Erwin Rohde on Greek soul-belief — built an image of an oriental, transformative, salvation-bearing pattern that prefigured or fed Christianity. Most of those synthetic claims have since been substantially revised. Cumont’s derivation of Roman Mithraism from Iranian worship has given way to a reading of it as a Roman-period creation organized around astronomical symbolism; Reitzenstein’s thesis that Christian rebirth language was borrowed wholesale from the mysteries has been corrected to a picture of shared late-antique milieu rather than direct descent. What survives from those works is the inventory of evidence and the shape of the questions, not the conclusions — which is why they are read now as historiographical documents in their own right.

Graded ascent in the Western orders

The same structure carries into the Western esoteric orders, where it became explicit, written, and counted. Freemasonry, emerging in its speculative form in the lodges of early-eighteenth-century Britain, organized itself as a ladder of degrees — Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, Master Mason — each conferred by a ceremony, each claiming to open what the degree below could not see; its central drama, the figured death and raising of the candidate, reproduces the old death-and-rebirth pattern in sober Augustan dress. The Rosicrucian current supplied not a rite but an idea: the manifestos printed at Kassel in 1614 and 1615, and the alchemical romance of the Chymical Wedding (1616), conjured a hidden initiatory fraternity that their readers then set out to build. By the late nineteenth century the impulse had crystallized into a self-conscious field. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, mapped its grades onto the sephirot of the kabbalistic Tree; the Theosophical Society and the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner — whose The Way of Initiation set out a path of inner schooling — described initiation as the disciplined opening of higher organs of perception; the orders gathered around Aleister Crowley carried the degree-system into the twentieth century.

Here the concept divides from its anthropological cousin in a way worth holding in view. For the structural analyst, the transformation worked by initiation is the alteration of social position — real, but bounded by that claim. For the esoteric tradition, articulated by writers such as René Guénon and Julius Evola and assumed by most practicing orders, initiation is a metaphysical event: a genuine joining to a transmission lineage, a current, a chain of authority or grace, of which the outward ceremony is only the vehicle. The two senses are not always at odds — Turner’s communitas has been congenial to esoteric self-description, and Eliade’s archaic ontology was openly adapted by the traditionalists — but they aim at different objects. The scholarly typology of Western esotericism makes the point structurally: in Antoine Faivre’s influential account, transmission through an initiatic chain is one of the marks by which the field defines itself, a nod to the initiatory self-understanding of the currents while preserving analytic distance from their claims.

The shaman’s election

At the far end from the lodge and the philosophical school stands an initiation that no one chooses. Across Siberia and the Central Asian steppe — among the Evenki and the Even, the Buryat and the Sakha, the Tuvan and the Altai peoples, whose practitioner-roles the single Western word shaman flattens into one — the call to the office characteristically comes as an initiatory illness: sickness, dreams, a crisis interpreted as the spirits’ summons, which the candidate cannot refuse without worse. The initiatory imaginary that the ethnographic record describes runs through skeletonization, dismemberment, and the reconstitution of the candidate’s body, the recruitment of helper and tutelary spirits, and the learning of a cosmos arranged in vertical tiers — upper, middle, and lower worlds joined by a world-tree or world-pillar, the axis mundi. Here the death-and-rebirth pattern is not staged by elders but suffered as affliction and emerges as vocation; the structure van Gennep abstracted from puberty rites and Eliade folded into his archaic ontology appears in its most involuntary and bodily form.

That this material can be described at all owes much to a documentary record that was itself produced under hard conditions — by Enlightenment travelers, by imperial-Russian science, by political exiles whose fieldwork was a by-product of penal banishment, and later by a Soviet state that documented the practices even as it tried to destroy them, branding their bearers class enemies and burning drums and regalia. “Shamanism” as a unified worldwide phenomenon is in large part a construction of outside observers, Eliade’s 1951 synthesis of archaic techniques of ecstasy foremost among them; the lived realities differ by people, period, and gender, and some communities reject the umbrella word entirely. To read shamanic initiation as one instance of a universal pattern is to risk exactly the homogenizing move the critics of Eliade have taught the field to watch for.

What the rites hold in common

The recurrence across all these settings is striking, and it is the kind of thing the comparative eye is quick to gather into one. The discipline of the subject lies in keeping the resemblance honest. A boy made a man, a candidate made a Master Mason, a soul turned toward the One, a Siberian healer seized by the spirits — these are doing formally similar things and meaning, by their own lights, very different ones. What recurs is not a doctrine but a structure and a conviction: that a person can be carried across a threshold he cannot reach by his own knowing, and that what waits on the far side is not information but a changed condition of being. The forms are local; the threshold is everywhere.

Texts and scholarship

The analytical literature on initiation is among the most consequential in the modern study of religion. Arnold van Gennep’s Les Rites de passage (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909) is the source from which the rest descends; the French original is in the public domain in the United States, and the standard English edition (Vizedom and Caffee, Chicago, 1960) remains under copyright. Mircea Eliade’s Birth and Rebirth / Rites and Symbols of Initiation (Harper, 1958/1965) is the influential and now heavily qualified comparative synthesis; his Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Bollingen, 1964) carries the argument into the Siberian material. Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (Aldine, 1969) and The Forest of Symbols (Cornell, 1967) develop liminality and communitas; Catherine Bell’s Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992) is the standard theoretical reset, and Jonathan Z. Smith’s Imagining Religion (Chicago, 1982) the standard methodological critique of comparativism. These current works are cited here by reference rather than reproduced.

On the ancient mysteries as initiatory institutions, Walter Burkert’s Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard, 1987) remains the authoritative compact synthesis, dismantling the notion of a uniform “mystery religion” in favor of a family of cults sharing form but not theology. The single most accessible recent treatment that is freely available is Jan N. Bremmer’s Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), published Open Access under a Creative Commons license and notable for its sustained reflection on the term teletē and on what modern scholarship has packaged under the rubric “initiation” (open-access edition, DOI 10.1515/9783110299557). The early-twentieth-century reconstructions that shaped the modern image — public domain and read now as historiography — include Jane Ellen Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1903) and Themis (Cambridge, 1912), and Franz Cumont’s Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (Open Court, 1911). For the esoteric lineage, the primary documents survive in print: James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Free-Masons (London, 1723) as the Masonic charter, the Rosicrucian Fama and Confessio (1614/1615), and the Hermetic-alchemical initiatory romance of Andreae’s Chymische Hochzeit (1616). The site’s library hosts Rudolf Steiner’s The Way of Initiation and Christianity as Mystical Fact, both of which read the ancient mysteries through an explicitly initiatory and esoteric frame.

→ In the library: Steiner — The Way of Initiation (1910) · Steiner — Christianity as Mystical Fact (1910)

→ Related: Gnosis · Apotheosis · Psyche · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Eleusis · Mystery Religions · Mithraic Mysteries · Freemasonry · Rosicrucianism · Golden Dawn Lineage · Ritual · Ecstasy