Initiatory Death
Violent death followed by rebirth The cabin, the forest, and darkness, are worldwide recurrent scenarios where rites of initiation take place, archetypal images that ‘express the eternal psychodrama of a violent death followed by rebirth’ (Eliade, 1995, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, Woodstock: Spring Publications, pp. 35-37).
The ordeals of initiation The ordeals of initiation are procedures that imply ritual death, followed by resurrection or a new birth, death corresponding to the temporary return to Chaos (hence the paradigmatic expression end of a mode of being) in order to assume another mode of being, as a new man (Eliade, 1995, p. xii-xiii). This follows the conception that a state cannot be changed without first being annihilated, and this obsession with the beginnings is the obsession with the absolute beginning, the cosmogony, or original creation (Eliade, 1995, p. xii-xiii).
Total annihilation Initiation is a primordial image that expresses ‘birth to a higher mode of being’, through the regression to a pre-formal state, to a latent mode of being (complementary to the pre-cosmogonic chaos) rather than total annihilation as death in the profane world is taken (Eliade, 1995, p. xv). Initiation puts an end to the natural man and introduces him to culture, namely the origin myth.
A shift in the sense-experience Thus, initiatory rites are deeply cultural events, because they reiterate the cosmogony and its creative power, regenerative also of the collective. All the ordeals of initiation follow the idea of a death to the profane condition, one of the most important features being the forgetfulness of language and, in general, a dramatic transformation in the previous bodily existence, expressed with enduring impact over sense-experience, a shift in its organization. This change of the mode of being is also due to having learned the origin myth, which tells of the sacredness of life, the world and the cosmos, and their binding as creations.
Monster and womb For these reasons, the initiatory cabin is also figured not only as the belly of a devouring monster who digests the novice, in which case the initiatory site gains the morphology of a tube or tunnel, but also as the womb, signifying the return to an embryonic condition, to a virtual, pre-formal, pre-cosmic mode, assuming egg-like or spherical figurations.
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