Mircea Eliade’s Birth and Rebirth began as the Haskell Lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago in the autumn of 1956, under the title “Patterns of Initiation.” He kept the spoken manner of those lectures when he prepared them for print, adding an introduction, notes, and a bibliography, and he addressed himself throughout to the nonspecialist rather than the specialist. The book moves from the tribal initiations of Australia and Tierra del Fuego through the secret societies of Africa and Melanesia, the heroic descents of Polynesian myth, and the shamanic ordeals of Siberia, and ends with the mystery cults of Greece and the camouflaged initiations of medieval romance and modern imaginative life. Its subject is not a single rite but a pattern: the ceremonial death that makes a new birth possible.
“The shaman or the medicine man can be defined as a specialist in the sacred, that is, an individual who participates in the sacred more completely, or more truly, than other men.”
Eliade’s premise is that initiation, in the strict sense, has all but disappeared from the modern Western world. Christian baptism and ordination preserve vestiges of it, but the West defines itself as purely historical and desires a desacralized cosmos. Every premodern society, by contrast—Western Europe until the close of the Middle Ages, elsewhere until the First World War—treated initiation as indispensable. Eliade uses the word for rites and oral teachings that produce a decisive change in religious and social status, a basic alteration of the novice’s existential condition: the initiate becomes another. He sorts this material into three broad categories—obligatory puberty rites for all the young, optional initiations into secret societies and confraternities, and initiations bound to a mystical vocation such as the shaman’s—and argues that a common structure underlies all three.
How the Initiatory Pattern Unfolds
The Vanishing of Initiation and the Argument of the Book
Eliade opens by noting that meaningful initiation has all but disappeared from the modern Western world, surviving only as vestiges in Christian baptism and ordination—Christianity went universal precisely by detaching itself from the Greco-Oriental mysteries. Modern man defines himself as purely historical, hungry for a desacralized cosmos, while every premodern society—Western Europe down to the end of the Middle Ages, elsewhere down to the First World War—prized initiation as a decisive alteration of religious and social status, a basic change in existential condition in which the novice becomes another. Puberty initiation was obligatory for all youth: through ordeals the adolescent won adult standing and learned the sacred myths, the gods’ names, the tribe’s mystical relations with Supernatural Beings. This was not modern instruction. The world is a divine work with a “history”—creation, a civilizing Hero or mythical Ancestor, his deeds and disappearance—and myth is exemplary, founding all behavior and institutions. Archaic man sees himself as the end product of mythical history; modern man sees prior history as human work to perfect indefinitely. Archaic history looks “closed,” yet no primitive society is absolutely closed—all borrow and change—but innovations are accepted as superhuman revelations, soon invested with the prestige of primordial ones. The central moment of initiation is ritual death and rebirth: initiatory death ends childhood, ignorance, and the profane condition. Cosmogony is the paradigm for every creation and is periodically reiterated, preceded by symbolic retrogression to Chaos—New Year rites extinguish fires, expel evils, license orgies, bring back the dead, then light new fires and repeat the cosmogony. Initiatory “death” corresponds to that return to Chaos; all rebirth rites indicate the novice attains an existence inaccessible to the uninitiated, and no state can be changed without first being annihilated. Initiatory death is figured by darkness, cosmic night, the telluric womb, a hut, a monster’s belly—regression to a preformal state linked with germination and embryology, or joining the dead and Ancestors. Man is made by old initiates applying what Supernatural Beings revealed; the new birth is divine work belonging to sacred history, not nature. Initiation ends the natural man and introduces culture, whose origin is supernatural—revealing the awesome seriousness with which archaic man assumed receiving and transmitting spiritual values.
Three Kinds of Initiation
Eliade seeks initiation’s deeper religious meaning from the history-of-religions perspective rather than cultural anthropology or sociology, ranging from palaeolithic cults to modern movements, including the Greco-Oriental mysteries, Indo-Tibetan Tantrism, Scandinavian berserkers, and the ordeals of mystics. He sorts the material into three categories: collective obligatory puberty rites, or tribal initiation into an age group; optional rites, individual or for small groups, entering secret societies, Bunds, or confraternities—mostly male Männerbünde, though female societies exist, mixed ones are rare and usually degenerate, and the Greco-Oriental mysteries belong here; and initiations tied to mystical vocation, the medicine man or shaman, marked by personal experience and entered either voluntarily, as “the quest,” or by vocation, “the call,” from Supernatural Beings. The second and third overlap, distinguished chiefly by the ecstasy of shamanic initiations, but a structural common denominator links them all. Initiation involves the individual’s entire life, not just “religion”; puberty initiation reveals the sacred, including mythology, cultural traditions, and sexuality—sacred in the premodern world. Through initiation men attain human status. It begins with rupture, separation from the mother, sometimes brutal, and involves the whole tribe, which is regenerated; hence initiations rank among the most important religious festivals.
The Sacred Ground and the Terror of the Novices
Australian puberty ceremonies are comparatively archaic. Many tribes take part, and months pass between the older men’s decision and the ceremony. The headman sends messengers with bull-roarers—long, thin, narrow pieces of wood on a string that roar when whirled—to other headmen. Tribes divided into two intermarrying classes initiate each other’s youths, so novices are initiated by their potential fathers-in-law, with elaborate precautions to keep women ignorant. The phases run: preparation of the sacred ground; separation of novices from mothers and all women; segregation in the bush or an isolated camp for instruction in traditions; operations—usually circumcision, tooth extraction, or subincision, sometimes scarring or hair-pulling; then special behavior, ordeals, and dietary taboos. The bora of eastern Australia begins with preparing a sacred ground. The novices feel religious fear and terror, told beforehand they will be captured and killed by Divine Beings. As children they took no part in tribal religious life; death seemed an exterior thing happening to others, especially the old. Now, torn from blissful childhood unconsciousness, they are told they will die by the divinity. Separation from their mothers fills them with forebodings of death—seized by unknown, often masked men, carried far off, laid on the ground, covered with branches. They face an unfamiliar darkness: not natural night with stars, moon, and fires, but absolute, menacing darkness peopled with mysterious beings, made terrifying by the divinity announced by the bull-roarers. This experience of darkness, death, and nearness of Divine Beings is repeated and deepened throughout initiation; the first act already implies death. The maternal universe was profane; the new one is sacred—a rupture of continuity—and passing from profane to sacred implies death: the novice dies to childhood and irresponsibility to gain a higher life of participation in the sacred.
The Kurnai and the Showing of the Grandfather
Among the Kurnai the central mystery is “Showing the Grandfather.” Novices lie down with rugs over their heads while the men whirl bull-roarers; the headman tells them to look at the sky and at the men. Two old men swear them to secrecy—not mother, sister, or any non-jeraeil. They are shown two bull-roarers, larger and smaller, called “man” and “woman,” and told the myth: long ago the Divine Being Mungan-Ngaua lived on earth and civilized the Kurnai; his son Tundum is their direct ancestor. Mungan-Ngaua instituted the mysteries, and Tundum first conducted them with the two bull-roarers bearing his and his wife’s names. A traitor revealed the jeraeil to women; in anger Mungan-Ngaua brought a cosmic cataclysm in which almost all humanity perished, then ascended into the sky, while Tundum and his wife were turned into porpoises. The old men hand the bull-roarers to the neophytes to whirl. Teaching continues: the duties of the adult, dramatic representations of mythical times. The final rite is a fresh separation from the mother: she asks her son for water and he splashes it over her; the women withdraw. Howitt saw a mother crying for her son as if dead.
The Cosmological Ground of New Birth
The argument turns on a claim that is easy to miss and hard to overstate: for archaic humanity the beginning of life is never merely biological. Creation itself is the model for every living creation, so a life beginning “in the absolute sense” is equivalent to the birth of a world. The sun, sinking each evening into darkness and the primordial waters—symbol of the uncreated and the virtual—resembles both the embryo in the womb and the neophyte hidden in the initiatory hut; its morning rise is a rebirth of the world, just as the initiate emerges from his hut. Burial in the embryonic position probably rests on the mystical interconnection between death, initiation, and return to the womb, and in some cultures this connection grows so strong that death itself is assimilated to initiation: the dying man undergoes an initiation. Fetal burial above all expresses hope of a new beginning—not of mere biological existence, since for the primitive to live is to share in the sacrality of the cosmos. This guards against the error of explaining every initiatory return to the womb as a wish to prolong biological life, which the text calls a quite recent discovery made possible only by a radical desacralization of nature. On this level, life remains a sacred reality, and that is what explains the continuity between archaic rites of initiatory new birth and the later techniques of longevity, spiritual rebirth, divinization, immortality, and absolute freedom found in India and China.
The examples show an initiatory scenario originally governing puberty rites being turned to other ends. Such multivalence is easy to grasp once one sees an increasingly broad application of a paradigmatic method—especially the method employed to “make” a man. Since the boy is made an adult by an initiation involving return to the womb, similar results are hoped for when other things are to be made: long life, or immortality. In the end every kind of making is homologized by being identified with the supreme example of the made, the cosmogony. Attaining another mode of being—that of spirit—is equivalent to being born a second time, to becoming a new man, and the most striking expression of newness is birth. The discovery of spirit is homologized to the appearance of life, and the appearance of life to the appearance of the world. In the dialectic making these homologies possible, the text discerns the emotion of primitive man discovering the life of spirit; the newness and autonomy of spiritual life could find no better expression than images of an absolute beginning, images anthropocosmic in structure, deriving at once from embryology and from cosmogony.
Maui and the Descent into the Great Mother
The fourth chapter, on individual initiations and secret societies, opens with descent to the underworld and heroic initiations. Earlier initiatory rites of return to the womb implied the initiand’s symbolic transformation into an embryo, and the return to the mother signified return to the chthonian Great Mother, rebirth from the womb of Terra Mater. Other myths display two new elements: the Hero enters the Great Mother’s womb without returning to the embryonic state, and the enterprise is particularly dangerous. A Polynesian myth makes the point. After a life full of adventures, Maui, the great Maori Hero, returned to his native country and the house of his ancestress Hine-mi-te-po, the Great Lady of Night. He found her asleep and, throwing off his clothes, entered the giantess’ body. He made his way through it without being stopped, but when he was about to emerge—half his body still inside her mouth—the birds accompanying him burst out laughing. Waking suddenly, the Great Lady clenched her teeth and cut the Hero in two, killing him. Because of this, the Maoris say, man is mortal; had Maui emerged safe and sound, men would have become immortal.
Maui’s ancestress is Mother Earth; to enter her body is to descend alive into the depths of the earth, into Hell. Here is a descent to the underworld such as the myths and sagas of the ancient East and the Mediterranean document. From one point of view all these myths have an initiatory structure: to descend into Hell alive and confront its monsters and demons is to undergo an initiatory ordeal. Such flesh-and-blood descents characterize heroic initiations, whose goal is the conquest of bodily immortality. These instances belong to initiatory mythology rather than to ritual proper, but myths are often more valuable than rites for understanding religious behavior, for the myth most completely reveals the deep, often unconscious desire of the religious man.
In all these contexts the chthonian Great Mother shows herself pre-eminently as Goddess of Death and Mistress of the Dead, displaying threatening and aggressive aspects. In the funerary mythology of Malekula a terrifying female figure, Temes or Le-hev-hev, awaits the dead man’s soul at the mouth of a cave or beside a rock. Before her, drawn on the ground, lies a labyrinthine design; when the dead man approaches, she obliterates half of it. If he already knows the design—that is, if he has been initiated—he finds the road easily; if not, the woman devours him.
Death and Resurrection in African Secret Societies
An African rite shows the same pattern in action. The candidate is spun to the ground and all cry that “so-and-so is dead”; the “dead man” is rolled while a funeral chant is sung, and his mother, brother, and sister mourn him. Initiated relatives then carry the “dead” men to a consecrated enclosure called the court of resurrection, where they are laid naked in a cross-shaped ditch until dawn on the day of “commutation” or resurrection—the first day of the native week of four days. The novices’ heads are shaved; they are beaten, thrown down, and resuscitated by dropping a peppery liquid into their eyes and nostrils. Before resurrection they take an oath of absolute secrecy, swearing to tell no one—woman, man, noninitiate, or white man—what they see, on pain of swelling up and death. The same pattern is recognizable in many other African secret societies.
Continuity runs between puberty rites and initiations into secret societies, with a constant increase in the severity of ordeals. Initiatory torture characterizes Melanesian secret societies and some North American confraternities; the ordeals of Mandan novices are famous for cruelty. Suffering has ritual value: it is inflicted by superhuman beings, and its goal is the spiritual transmutation of the initiand, with extreme suffering expressing initiatory death. Certain serious illnesses, especially psychomental disorders, are read as signs that superhuman beings have chosen the sick man to be initiated—tortured, dismembered, and “killed”—so that he may be resuscitated to a higher existence. Initiatory sickness is a principal syndrome of the shamanic vocation; the tortures of candidates for secret societies are homologous to the sufferings symbolizing the mystical death of the future shaman. In both cases there is spiritual transmutation.
Arthurian Ordeals and the Initiatory Imagination
The book turns from tribal and ancient rites to the literature of medieval Europe, where initiatory symbols survive in the adventures of Arthurian romance. In the Grail Castle, Percival must keep a night watch in a chapel beside a dead knight; thunder rolls and a black hand snuffs out the single candle. Eliade reads this as a classic initiatory vigil. The heroes cross bridges that sink underfoot or are made of a sharp sword, or that are guarded by lions and monsters; castle gates are held by animated automatons, fairies, or demons. Such scenarios point to a passage into the beyond and to perilous descents to Hell which, when undertaken by the living, belong to an initiation. By risking the descent the hero seeks immortality or some other extraordinary end. At the close of the quest the Arthurian hero cures the king’s malady, regenerates the Waste Land, or wins sovereignty—a function generally bound to an initiatory ritual.
Fairy Tales and the Life of the Imagination
This literature matters because of its popular success: the adventures answered a profound need in medieval man, whose imagination was fed by initiatory scenarios. The life of the imagination is as important for the psyche as daily life, which raises a problem for psychology. When initiatory patterns lost their ritual reality they became literary motifs, carrying their spiritual message on another plane by addressing the imagination. Something similar had happened long before with fairy tales. Paul Saintyves tried to show that one category of fairy tale is initiatory in structure and origin; other folklorists took up the thesis, and the Dutch Germanist Jan de Vries brought out the initiatory elements in sagas and fairy tales. Whatever side one takes in the controversy, the ordeals and adventures of fairy-tale heroes are almost always translatable into initiatory terms. From the time fairy tales took shape, men primitive and civilized have listened to them with a pleasure open to indefinite repetition. Initiatory scenarios, even camouflaged, express a psychodrama that answers a deep human need: every man wants to experience perilous situations, confront exceptional ordeals, and make his way into the Other World—doing so on the level of imaginative life by hearing or reading fairy tales, or on the level of dream life by dreaming.
The Fedeli d’Amore and the Hidden Language of Love
Another phenomenon, apparently chiefly literary but probably comprising an initiatory organization, is the Fedeli d’Amore, documented in the thirteenth century in Provence and Italy as well as in France and Belgium. They formed a secret spiritual militia devoted to the cult of the “One Woman” and to initiation into the mystery of “Love.” They used a hidden language (parlar cruz) so that their doctrine would not reach la gente grosa, as Francesco da Barberino (1264–1348) put it. Another fedele, Jacques de Baisieux, lays down in his poem C’est des fiez d’amours that the fedele must not reveal Love’s counsels but hide them with care. That the initiation through Love was spiritual is clear from Baisieux’s reading of the word amor: sans means sense and mor means death, so that joined together they yield “deathless sense.” “Woman” symbolizes the transcendent intellect, Wisdom. Love of a woman awakens the adept from the lethargy into which the Christian world had fallen through the spiritual unworthiness of the pope. Their writings allude to a “widow who is no widow”—Madonna Intelligenza, left a widow because her husband, the pope, died to spiritual life by giving himself entirely to things temporal. Strictly speaking this is not a heretical movement but a secret group that no longer accorded the pope the status of spiritual leader of Christianity. Nothing is known of their rites, but they must have had them, for they were a militia and held secret meetings. They matter chiefly because they illustrate a phenomenon that becomes more marked later: the communication of a secret spiritual message through literature. Dante is the most famous example of this tendency—which anticipates the modern world—to treat art, especially literature, as the paradigmatic way of communicating a theology, a metaphysics, and even a soteriology.
Camouflaged Myth in a Desacralized World
These remarks help explain what initiatory patterns have become in the modern world—the various categories of people who no longer have any religious experience properly speaking and who live a desacralized existence in a desacralized world. An attentive analysis of their behavior, beliefs, and ideals could reveal a whole camouflaged mythology and fragments of a forgotten or degraded religion. This is not surprising, for it was as homo religiosus that man first became conscious of his own mode of being. Whether he wants to or not, the nonreligious man of modern times continues the behavior patterns, beliefs, and language of homo religiosus, though he desacralizes them and empties them of their original meanings. The festivals and celebrations of a nonreligious society, its public ceremonies, spectacles, sports competitions, youth organizations, propaganda by pictures and slogans, literature for mass popular consumption—all still preserve the structure of myths, symbols, and rites, though emptied of their old content.
The Scholarly Apparatus
The endnotes that follow document the argument across its whole range. They cite ethnographic sources on Australian initiation—Roth on Queensland, Ashley-Montagu and Elkin and Kaberry on Aboriginal conception beliefs, with Warner, Roheim, and the Berndts disputing whether the aborigines were ignorant of the real cause of conception, and Ashley-Montagu’s reply. They record novices dressed as girls and costumes burned at the close of initiation; the reopening of a vein in the arm as equivalent to reopening the urethral incision; Hogbin on Wogeo, where women are cleansed by menstruation while men must periodically incise the penis to let blood flow, often called “men’s menstruation.” Gusinde is cited for the Yamana, where revelations about the Supreme Being are made by allusion rather than directly and the Earth Spirit Yetaita plays the principal role; Lowie held the Yamana puberty ceremony was originally only for boys. The notes trace the “terrorization of women” complex through South American tribes, the Men’s House as characteristic of the Melanesian cultural complex, the Karesau candidates isolated in cabins and said to be in the spirit’s belly, and the Congo distinction between initiates called nganga, “the knowing ones,” and noninitiates called vanga, “the unenlightened.”
Further notes quote Kaberry on the graded stages of women’s initiation in northwestern Australia, and outline a recurring myth pattern: a Supernatural Being kills men to initiate them; men, not understanding this initiatory death, avenge themselves by slaying him; afterward they institute secret ceremonies related to this primordial drama; and the Being is made present through an image or sacred object representing his body or voice. The cabin of the Wauwalak Sisters represents the Mother’s womb, and one quotation preserves the lament: “
Dying to Childhood, Being Born to the Sacred
The heart of the pattern is ritual death. In the Australian ceremonies Eliade describes, the novice is seized from his mother by masked men, laid on the ground, and covered with branches; he meets a darkness that is not the ordinary night but an absolute, menacing dark peopled with divine beings. He has died to childhood and irresponsibility, and only so can he be born into the sacred. The Kurnai call their central mystery “Showing the Grandfather,” and its essence is the revelation of the Supreme Being’s name and myth, together with the bull-roarers that bear his son’s name. Among the Yuin, the secret is Daramulun, who lives beyond the sky, watches what men do, and receives them after death; the novices learn of him only after their incisor is knocked out and they are shown his image carved on a tree. The pattern holds across cultures: the novice is annihilated as he was so that he may be remade as something the uninitiated cannot be.
Eliade reads the symbolism of the return to the womb in cosmological rather than biological terms. The sun plunges each evening into the primordial waters and rises reborn; the neophyte hidden in the initiatory hut repeats that movement. To be buried in the embryonic position is to hope for a new beginning of life—but life understood as participation in the sacrality of the cosmos, not mere biological survival. This is why the same scenario could later be turned to other ends: if a boy can be made an adult by a rite of return to the womb, then long life, immortality, and spiritual rebirth can be sought by the same method. All making is finally homologized to the supreme making, the cosmogony.
The book’s later chapters widen the frame. Maui’s fatal entry into the body of his ancestress Hine-mi-te-po becomes a descent to the underworld, the ordeal of heroic initiation, and the reason men are mortal. The shaman’s initiation carries the pattern further still: the candidate is dismembered, reduced to a skeleton, and revivified, because bone is the indestructible root from which life arises—a hunter’s idea of renewal, quite different from the farmer’s image of the seed buried in the earth. Among the Buriat, the candidate climbs a birch set up through the smoke hole of the yurt, its nine notches standing for the nine heavens, and the ascent to the sky is the consecration itself.
What the Pattern Became
When the rites lost their ritual reality, Eliade argues, the scenarios did not vanish; they migrated. The ordeals of Arthurian heroes—the night watch in the chapel with the dead knight, the sword-bridge, the castles guarded by automatons—translate directly into initiatory terms, and the quest ends in the healing of the king or the regeneration of the Waste Land. Fairy tales, which men have listened to with pleasure capable of indefinite repetition, express the same psychodrama on the plane of imagination: every man wants to face the perilous passage and enter the Other World, if only by hearing a story or dreaming. The Fedeli d’Amore of thirteenth-century Provence and Italy, with their hidden language and cult of the “One Woman” who symbolizes transcendent Wisdom, show a secret spiritual message being carried by literature—a tendency Eliade sees culminating in Dante, and anticipating the modern habit of treating art as the vehicle of a metaphysics.
Even the nonreligious modern, Eliade concludes, continues the behavior of homo religiosus while emptying it of meaning; festivals, spectacles, sports, and mass literature still preserve the structure of myths and rites. The book’s closing claim is that initiation reveals the seriousness with which archaic man assumed the task of receiving and transmitting spiritual values—and that the need those rites answered has not disappeared, only changed its address.
