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Introduction by Michael Meade

THE close of the twentieth century can be looked at simply, even fundamentally, as “the end,” or
else, it can be seen as a thorough change, a period of radical alteration, a rush of endings and
beginnings.

…The radical dismantling of institutions, boundaries, beliefs and ecosystems that characterizes
the end of an era is an extended funeral that we can consciously attend or try to deny. At some
level, we each know that huge shifts in nature and culture are affecting us daily.

…Mircea Eliade fervently worked at keeping the doors of perception open to the world of sacred
symbols and creative ritual.

…Rites and Symbols of Initiation was first published in 1958 on the eve of an onslaught of
social, sexual, and spiritual changes in American culture. At first titled Birth and Rebirth, it
served as an academic text for many years. Now, it finds regeneration as Mircea Eliade intended
it, “addressed to any nonspecialist reader interested in the spiritual history of humanity.”

…He reaches all the way back and down to the roots of the mysteries of birth and death, seeking
the parts they play in times of change and renewal.

…Eliade tracks the survival of the rites and symbols in the realms of dream, alchemy, literature,
and psychotherapy.

…On the ground of initiation, death is the opposite of birth, not the opposite of life. Life includes
both, and the of life regenerates in the land of death. Archaic rites of initiation show the basic
pattern for genuine change. For any transformation to be meaningful it must be thorough, and to
be thorough requires both the ache of loss and a spirit of restoration.

…The initiate becomes as another person.

…As Eliade says, “this meaning is always religious.” Or as we now might say, the meaning is
always spiritual, elementally spiritual before becoming religious. During initiation, the individual
becomes bound through spiritual experience to the future of the society on one hand and open to
the origins and ancestral beginnings of the group in the past.

…When rites of passage disappear from conscious presentation, they nonetheless appear in
unconscious and semiconscious guises.

…In the history of initiation, woundings, beatings, scarifications and hair-cutting represent dying
by losing some part of the living world to the “other world” of death.

…Behind actual death [of those involved in a ritual] hides the desire to find full life through a
symbolic death that reveals a core of meaning and purpose in their lives.

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…When the inner purpose and spirit of a person do not get revealed, revalued, and
acknowledged by an appropriate community, people increasingly feel like victims and act like
outcasts.

…Puberty rites often begin the psychological and spiritual division of rights and powers between
the genders, and rites of separation often distinguish different paths for each.

…During initiation the womb manifests as symbol of renewal and generativity showing the body
to be a spiritual vessel, necessary for understanding the body of nature and for carrying
knowledge of the tribe.

…Eliade writes that “it does not fall to us to determine to what extent traditional initiations
fulfilled their promises. The important fact is that they proclaimed their intention and professed
to possess the means of transmuting human life.”

…Eliade again: “In such moments of total crisis, only one hope seems to offer any issue – the
hope of beginning life over again.” Anyone caught in a total crisis feels that he or she is brushing
against death, and anyone “undergoing such a crisis dreams of new, regenerated life, fully
realized and significant.” Amongst the sadness, loss and litter at the end of the age, Eliade
reminds us that “the hope and dream of these moments of total crisis are to obtain a definitive
and total renovatio, a renewal capable of transmuting life.”

Mircea Eliade

Initiation Mysteries in Primitive Religions: Preliminary Remarks

IN this book I shall present the most important types of initiation, seeking above all to decipher
their deeper meaning. This meaning is always religious, for the change of existential status in the
novice is produced by a religious experience. The initiate becomes another man because he has
had a crucial revelation of the world and life. I shall therefore treat this important and difficult
problem in the perspective of the history of religion and not, as is usually done, in the
perspectives of cultural anthropology or sociology.

…the historian of religion will include the entire religious history of humanity in his field of
investigation, from the earliest cults in palaeolithic times

…Generally speaking, the history of religion distinguishes three categories, or types, of

initiations. The first category comprises the collective rituals whose function is to effect the
transition from childhood or adolescence to adulthood, and which are obligatory for all members
of a particular society. Ethnological literature terms these rituals “puberty rites,” “tribal
initiation,” or “initiation into an age group.”

The other two categories of initiations differ from puberty initiations in that they are not
obligatory for all members of the community and that most of them are performed individually
or for comparatively small groups. The second category includes all types of rites for entering a
secret society, a Bund, or a confraternity. These secret societies are limited to one sex and are

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extremely jealous of their respective secrets. Most of them are male and constitute secret
fraternities (Männerbünde); but there are also some female secret societies. On the level of
primitive cultures, societies open to both sexes are extremely rare; where they exist, they usually
represent a phenomenon of degeneration. But in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern
world, the mysteries were open to both sexes; and although they are a little different in type, we
can put the Greco-Oriental mysteries in the category of secret confraternities.

Finally, there is a third category of initiation – the type that occurs in connection with a mystical
vocation, that is, on the level of primitive religions, the vocation of the medicine man or the
shaman.

…the puberty 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. In a great many cases, puberty
rites, in one way or another, imply the revelation of sexuality – but, for the entire premodern
world, sexuality, too, participates in the sacred.

…the puberty initiation begins with an act of rupture – the child or the adolescent is separated
from his mother, and sometimes the separation is performed in a decidedly brutal way.

…Since the initiation ceremonies were founded by the divine beings or the mythical ancestors,
the primordial time is reintegrated whenever they are performed. …For what is involved here is a
fundamental conception in archaic religions – the repetition of a ritual founded by divine beings
implies the reactualization of the original time when the rite was first performed. This is why a
rite has efficacy – it participates in the completeness of the sacred primordial time. The rite
makes the myth present. Everything that the myth tells of the time of beginning, the “bugari
times,” the rite reactualizes, shows it as happening, here and now.

…the sacred ground plays an essential role in Australian initiation ceremonies because it
represents the image of the primordial world as it was when the divine being was on earth.

…In varied initiation ceremony, certain features strike us first. Particularly noticeable are the
insistence upon secrecy and above all the dramatic quality of the ritual. This is in the form of a
scenario with several principal moments: dances by the medicine men and exhibition of their
magical powers, dramatic revelation of the name and myth of the supreme being, violent
extraction of the novice’s incisor.

…dietary prohibitions also have a quite complex religious function,

…the specific tribal rite is circumcision, …tattooing, tearing out the hair, scarring the skin of the
back.

…This discovery that man is part and parcel of a sacred history that can be communicated only
to initiates constitutes the point of departure for a long-continued flowering of religious forms.