INITIATION

I'm supposedly at the stage of editing my book on the Medicine Wheel. But all I seem to be doing is adding more. I never knew I had so many opinions :) Anyway, here is a piece from the 2nd Chapter (The East) on the subject of initiation:

There are certain major changes that correspond to the biological stages of life, but which also reflect inner changes. And there are other major changes which are less biologically determined. In a traditional society, these more regular changes are marked by ceremony and by initiation. Any new phase, where something new enters our consciousness is an initiation. Birth and death are initiations, in which you cannot know what is coming next. Puberty is a time of initiation, in which we begin to make the transition from child to adult.

A traditional puberty rite usually contains an element of ordeal, and spirit vision/induction into the tribal myths, and acceptance as an adult by the community. For the Sioux in North America, for example, the boy is firstly put through a Sweatlodge (which is characterised by intense heat) and then immediately brought to a hilltop where he is placed in a cramped vision pit (Patrick Harpur, The Philosopher's Secret Fire pp91-7) for days without food and water. At the end of this time he will, hopefully, have been granted a vision and been turned from a boy to a man.

We do not, uniquely, have such rites of passage in our culture, nor do we (again, uniquely) have a prevailing mythology that provides meaning. It may well mean as a result that many boys and girls take a lot longer reaching adulthood, if at all.

However, it is not my purpose to bemoan this situation. We have what we have, and let is not compare ourselves unfavourably, it doesn't usually help. Young people DO attempt to initiate themselves, albeit with necessarily realising it. It is a natural thing. Life has a way of initiating us anyway.

As Patrick Harpur says: “During a special sacred time of about two weeks in summer, young European initiates fly to the Otherworld where they inhabit a liminal zone between land and sea. By day they are ‘cooked’ by a process of frying under a scorching sun, and periodically plunged into cold water; by night they undergo an elaborate Dionysian ritual involving an orgy of wine, dancing and sex. They call this a ‘Mediterranean holiday’.” I would add the drug ‘Ecstasy’ to Harpur’s account, the illegality of which adds an initiatory edge, taking one outside permitted norms.

Criminal behaviour, dangerous driving, risk-taking (I still shudder at the blind corner on which I impatiently overtook someone when I was 20) are often also driven by this craving for initiation.

So it is worth looking back and seeing where your own need for initiation took you as a teenager and young adult, and the new elements that may have entered your consciousness, and their implications for your future.