How to initiate your sons

Building the missing rites of passage

Initiation represents one of the most significant spiritual phenomena in the history of humanity… It is through initiation that, in primitive and archaic societies, man becomes what he is and what he should be; a being open to the life of the spirit… initiation represents above all the revelation of the sacred - and, for the primitive world, the sacred means not only everything that we now understand by religion, but also the whole body of the tribe's mythological and cultural traditions… it is a fundamental existential experience because through it a man becomes able to assume his mode of being in its entirety.

— Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth

I. INTRODUCTION

To make a clean break from the spiritual collapse of our civilization, we require rites of passage that initiate our sons into a superior conception of manhood. Indeed, one of the primary reasons for our society’s ongoing psychic collapse is a general dearth of rites of passage; this must be remedied.

Here I will discuss why this is necessary, which aspects we must incorporate into our rituals, and how we should begin.

Arnold van Gennep coined the term ‘rites of passage’ in his 1909 work of the same name (‘Les Rites de Passage’). In this foundational work of anthropology, he notes that each society contains within itself distinct and smaller societies, expressed in groupings of caste, sex, age, role, and so forth.

An initiation ritual mediates the transition of an individual between two of these spheres, where such a transition is possible. This essay will focus on the archetype of the transition from boyhood to manhood.

The term initiation in the most general sense denotes a body of rites and oral teachings whose purpose is to produce a decisive alteration in the religious and social status of the person to be initiated. In philosophical terms, initiation is equivalent to a basic change in existential condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.

— Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation

I will not discuss the specifics of the initiation of girls into womanhood, because these are typically quite different, with a focus on first menstruation and fertility, mediated by seclusion, ritual purification, and mentorship by older women. If there is interest perhaps I will collaborate with a female author on such a post.

Charles Ernest Butler, King Arthur (1903)

II. THE IMPORTANCE OF INITIATION

The stability of the individual and the cohesion of the community requires each man to know himself and what he must do. Although no man is the same, and each will change over the course of his life, each of us is able to maintain a positive self-conception and a resonance with those around us by remaining fundamentally tethered to archetypes of the categories of men that our society upholds: father, husband, son, king, warrior, priest, and so forth.

The proper functioning of this system relies on us having a conception of which archetype we are inhabiting at any given moment and what this requires of us.

Transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man’s life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings: birth, social puberty, marriage, fatherhood, advancement to a higher class, occupational specialization, and death. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined.

— Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage

There are some exceptional men with a rare ability and calling to exist outside of the established archetypical structures of a given society, but they are the exception. For most men, losing clarity about which defined position they are inhabiting causes listlessness and existential uncertainty.

In order to effectively transition from one role to the next, a man must ‘step outside of time’ and temporarily transcend himself in order to discover and take up the heroic, mythical archetypes of his society. This process is facilitated by undergoing the relevant initiation ritual.

Religious historian Mircea Eliade posited that initiation rites guide a man through a ritualized reenactment of the divine myths of his society, integrating the sacred archetypes with his own life, representing a decisive moment in which he is remade in the image of the gods and heroes of his faith.

For archaic thought, then, man is made - he does not make himself all by himself. It is the old initiates, the spiritual masters, who make him. But these masters apply what was revealed to them at the beginning of Time by the Supernatural Beings [the gods]. They are only the representatives of those Beings; indeed, in many cases they incarnate them. This is as much as to say that in order to become a man, it is necessary to resemble a mythical model… This birth requires rites instituted by the Supernatural Beings; hence it is a divine work, created by the power and will of those Beings; it belongs, not to nature (in the modern, secularized sense of the term), but to sacred history… it is, first of all, to know what has happened in the world, has really happened, what the Gods and the civilizing Heroes did - their works, adventures, dramas.

— Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation

Thus the initiation ritual unites the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the physical, the individual and the community. The world as lived and the world as imagined become fused.

As each man goes through this process, society retains its structure and spiritual vitality. Its heroes are venerated; its myths are repeated; its gods are feared; and its men are integrated.

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified. They are written into the body, incorporated, that is, physically internalized. Thus, rituals create a bodily knowledge and memory, an embodied identity, a bodily connection. A ritual community is a communal body, and there is a bodily dimension inherent to community.

Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present

The individual that completes the manhood initiation ritual moves from an innocent state of childhood into a mature moral state in which good and evil have been revealed to him, as well as the duties that are thus incumbent upon him. He has been made aware of his own mortality, and will live the rest of his life in communion with the sacred.

This existential break - although challenging - ultimately provides assurance and closure. It is a sign that the community recognises him as mature, as a man, providing confidence and assurance. Having left his childhood behind, he knows not just what he must take up but what he must decisively leave behind (childlike things).

The intention of all that is done at this ceremony is to make a momentous change in the boy’s life; the past is to be cut off from him by a gulf which he can never re-pass. His connection with his mother as her child is broken off, and he becomes henceforth attached to the men. All the sports and games of his boyhood are to be abandoned with the severance of the old domestic ties between himself and his mother and sisters. He is now to be a man, instructed in and sensible of the duties which devolve upon him….

— Alfred William Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia

III. FEATURES OF THE INITIATION RITE

In order to build our rituals, we must know the essential features. Here I will provide these.

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