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.
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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Arnold van Gennep notes a universal tripartite structure: Separation → Transition → Reincorporation.
As above, the initiate is taken away from his mother and the other women of his family (‘Separation’), to a gathering of men on ground that has been designated sacred. Sacred spaces vary by religion - for us Christians these would be churches and other holy sites of the faith - but Mircea Eliade, in his masterwork The Sacred and the Profane, notes some more general essential qualities.
For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others. “Draw not nigh hither,” says the Lord to Moses; “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Exodus, 3, 5)…
When the sacred manifests itself… there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the non-reality of the vast surrounding expanse…
— Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion
Note the existential starkness with which the truly religious man divides sacred from profane space. This is not a practical concern or ‘zoning issue’, as a typical modern mind might interpret it. A true recognition of sacred space implies a reverence so deep that it brings on a religious terror, as the men might have had in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant, the touch of which bought instant death.
The requirement for the recognition of sacred space thus in turn implies the need for true religious conviction.
The ziggurat was literally a cosmic mountain; the seven stories represented the seven planetary heavens; by ascending them, the priest reached the summit of the universe. A like symbolism explains the immense temple of Borobudur, in Java; it is built as an artificial mountain. Ascending it is equivalent to an ecstatic journey to the center of the world; reaching the highest terrace, the pilgrim experiences a break-through from plane to plane; he enters a “pure region” transcending the profane world. Dur-an-ki, “Link between Heaven and Earth,” was a name applied to a number of Babylonian sanctuaries.
— Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane
Following the Separation and the entry into sacred space, the initiate is exposed to divinely-ordained teachings, rites, and tests.
The teachings are of good and evil, duty and prohibition, history and myth, truth and mystery. This is the ancient and hidden knowledge that is reserved for the men of a people. It is not to be shared outside of that select group.
Every primitive society possesses a consistent body of mythical traditions, a "conception of the world"; and it is this conception that is gradually revealed to the novice in the course of his initiation. What is involved is not simply instruction in the modern sense of the word. In order to become worthy of the sacred teaching, the novice must first be prepared spiritually. For what he learns concerning the world and human life does not constitute knowledge in the modern sense of the term, objective and compartmentalized information, subject to indefinite correction and addition. The world is the work of Supernatural Beings - a divine work and hence sacred in its very structure… The world has a "history": first, its creation by Supernatural Beings; then, everything that took place after that - the coming of the civilizing Hero or the mythical Ancestor, their cultural activities, their demiurgic adventures, and at last their disappearance.
— Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation
…“mysteries” comprise the ceremonial whole which transfers the neophyte from the profane to the sacred world and places him in direct and permanent communication with the latter.
— Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage
These teachings are not presented plainly, as one would listen to a lecture in a classroom. It is imperative that the initiate is completely focused and in a mode of total receptivity, that he might be totally remade by the Truth. Thus the teachings are accompanied by images, chants, performances, and liturgies. They are delivered in situations of great intensity, like in the presence of roaring fires that give off near-unbearable heat. Throughout this, the neophyte must be silent, or deliver only ritualized answers. Their individuality during this time is irrelevant; indeed - it is being rewritten.
These activities bear themes that recur across times and cultures. These include being exiled to the wilderness for a time (this indeterminate place representing the liminal state of transition between definite roles); dramatic events symbolizing death and rebirth (that their existential change may be more total); events representing being ‘swallowed by a god’ (as with immersion baptism - being totally absorbed into the sacred).
The initiate must often prove himself worthy, by accepting physical deprivation (lack of sleep, food, water, light) or intentional pain. They must take up challenges which demonstrate great skill or bravery (see, for example, the Spartan Krypteia, in which young elites were sent away to the mountains naked, and had to live for extended periods on what they could steal or fight for). An equivalent in our time might involve a hunt for a dangerous and intelligent wild animal, like a stag or an elk.
As the initiates passed successfully through these challenges, they gain the right to bear marks of their new status: permanent physical marks like scars and tattoos denoting their successful initiation into the group.
The mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the incorporation is permanent.
— Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage
Again, the particulars of these rites must be harmonious with the genuinely held sacred beliefs of a given society. Their adoption should not be self-conscious, false, or forced: covering oneself in Yakuza-style tattoos does not make one a Yakuza. Thus is is important to find expressions that are harmonious with and reenforce one’s natural convictions.
Rather than scarification or other foreign mutilation practices, for example, the Christian Westerner might consider a practice which incorporates natural elements of their cultural tradition, such as the bearing of a coat of arms or other group insignia.
The exterior emblem is the coat of arms, which corresponds to the representation of the totem for the totem groups and to such signs as scarifications and tattoos for age groups and secret societies. The affixing of the coat of arms, like that of the totemic emblem, is clearly a rite of incorporation, as is the “marking” of the mysteries. Only in form do the rites vary according to peoples and kinds of restricted groups.
— Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage
IV. OUR TASK
Because an initiation ritual must be natural and particular to a given (sub-)society, I can only offer structural suggestions, and cannot provide readers with a comprehensive suggested ritual. To do so would be artificial and the resulting rite would lack the organic power that is required.
However, I ask readers to have confidence that it is possible for them to take on this task. We on the Right have many natural advantages in this regard: we believe in divinity and transcendence; we are familiar with dealing in hidden truths; we recognize the divide between the sexes; we are willing to embrace hardship and pain; we recognize redemption in suffering; we uphold the particularity of communities; we recognize the importance of tradition and ritual.
As I begin the task of devising a rite of passage for my sons, it will be in accordance with our Christian faith, take place in the wilderness of the land we live in, and involve a dangerous task (perhaps involving cold waters) that I believe they can overcome if prepared. I have a few years before the time will come for the ceremony. In the meantime I will also be talking to other families that we are close to, to ensure wider participation.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Johann, will you share your specific ideas for a rite later? We have been discussing this as well after reading "The Intentional Father" by Jon Tyson.