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 practise 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.

The pattern is among the most widely attested in the study of human cultures. Anthropologists describe a recurring three-part shape, named in the early twentieth century: separation from one’s former status, a marginal or threshold phase outside ordinary life, and reincorporation under a new identity. Puberty rites, admission to a craft or a priesthood, enthronements, and the secret societies of many peoples all fall under it. What the rites share is not a doctrine but a structure — the candidate is taken apart and put back together, and emerges counted as something he was not before.

In the ancient Mediterranean the word attached above all to the mystery cults. At Eleusis, for well over a millennium, those admitted to the rites of Demeter were sworn to silence about what they saw, and the silence held: the central secret is genuinely lost. The cults of Isis, of Mithras, of the Great Mother each had their gradations and their ordeals. What the texts say is sparse and guarded; what the initiates believed, on the evidence of those who broke into print, was that the rite secured a better lot beyond death — that they had, in some sense, rehearsed dying and come back. The philosopher’s vocabulary borrowed the language: in the Platonic tradition the soul’s ascent toward the Good is figured as an initiation, the highest vision as the final mystery.

The same structure carries into the Western esoteric orders, where it became explicit and graded. Freemasonry, the eighteenth-century lodges, and the ritual magic of the nineteenth-century revival all organized themselves as ladders of degrees, each conferred by a ceremony, each claiming to open what the one below could not see. Here initiation is understood tradition-internally as more than admission to a society — it is taken to work a real change in the person, to confer a knowledge that cannot be passed on by instruction alone.

The recurrence is striking, and it is the kind of thing the comparative eye is quick to gather into one. The caution is that the resemblance is structural before it is doctrinal: a boy made a man, a candidate made a Master Mason, and a soul turned toward the One are doing formally similar things and meaning very different ones. What the rites hold in common is the conviction that some thresholds cannot be crossed by knowing about them — only by being taken across.

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

→ Related: Gnosis · Apotheosis · Psyche · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus