Initiation into Death

At the dawn of humanity, before historical time, began the formation of human society. The gods came down among men and revealed to them, by various signs and symbols, what they were meant to do. How to plow and when to do it was demonstrated by the marriage and copulation of the Sky Father and the Earth Mother, the seeds of sacred agriculture were planted, and the minds of men became pregnant with myth. In rapid succession it became clear that man was not alone, and that he belonged to a greater chain of being.

The strong god of the hunt commanded young men into the wilderness and acts of heroic violence, while mysteries of order and civilization were revealed to the mystics. If the wrong oblations were made then the furious god of the storm washed away their dwellings and their lives. Omens were sent in the form of owls or lightning-strikes, and diseases announced the displeasure of a deity. Enlightened gods asked for prayers and the occasional sacrifice, while crueler gods demanded human blood and instilled only fear.

However, as Mircea Eliade relates, mythology and initiation into a certain mythology was not about the mere observance of natural phenomenon. Real knowledge, real wisdom, was what we now call the “esoteric”. Any dullard can observe the change in seasons and infer rudimentary details about the world, anyone could do the job of a modern scientist. The real wisdom of archaic man came from the revealing to him, by his elders, of the sacrality of the universe and his own being.

As the gods and creation were ordered and brought into their places, so did order come to men and chaos was displaced. It would be unwise to speculate “when” in human history this happened, as it is clear there was never a definitive historical point where we might say man became initiated into his own life. To archaic man, or religious man, to imitate the actions of the gods was the “purpose” of life. A well lived life was in accordance with divine order, and every action was only given precedence by the prior action of a god.

The most important foundational ritual is what we know as the ritual of initiation. Before initiation man was and is as a wild beast. Not recognized by men because of his refusal to participate in what gave human life meaning, to reject the worship of the gods or to live outside of religion was tantamount to living in a bestial state. The author speaks in the past tense as modernity tends to assign the qualities of enlightenment and intellectual superiority to those who, in a prior age, would be deemed unfit to live in actual civilization.

Out of all the mysteries passed down to us by the ancients, perhaps the most well known among Europeans are those of the Eleusinian mysteries and the mysteries communicated by Plato. Besides the classical Greek and Thracian models also preserved in the rites of Dionysus and the Orphic hymns, we look north and west for examples from the Germanic and Nordic societies of ancient Europe. I refer to, of course, the berserkers and the koryos. Wild young Indo-European men were sent out from their society, taking on the fierce aspects of the wild beasts of the steppe and forests, initiated into the rites of warfare and glorious ancestral deeds. A very close example, the berserkers of the Nordic tribes were made mad, perhaps by Odin himself as is related in the Ynglinga Saga:

„…Odin could make his enemies in battle blind, or deaf, or terror-struck, and their weapons so blunt that they could no more but than a willow wand; on the other hand, his men rushed forward without armour, were as mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were strong as bears or wild bulls, and killed people at a blow, but neither fire nor iron told upon themselves. These were called Berserker.“

While many of these primitive rites of passage might be compared to and against each other, what interests our project the most is the recognition of ancient societies that there was a need for violence to begin a new mode of being. While the berserker fit of rage was not permanent in the literal sense, it was clear that he had become something more than a man, that he transcended the human condition. It might be said that he was assimilated to a rage that could only come from the gods. Likewise, the young man of the koryos was transformed, from runt to an imitator, and thus exemplar, of his heroic ancestors. In both cases, the entirety of the previous individual was shed, and he returned into human society completely changed.

It is not these rites that managed to survive the longest or inspire the cultivation of society, but they remain an important, if archaic, example of initiation. What ended up triumphing, and to be completed by Christianity, were the great mystery traditions mentioned before.

The central focus of any good mystery is the initiatory death of the individual and his resurrection into an entirely new mode of being. Through initiation, the laws of the universe and the sacred liturgies of humanity were revealed. From a vast medley that incorporated themes of death and rebirth from Egypt to Thrace, the Eleusinian Mysteries held massive sway over the ancient Hellenic world, up to the era of Christ. What was promised by the revelation of these mysteries to neophytes was the conquering of death, by dying before the grave.

There exists a similar concept in orthodox Christianity, known as theosis. Significantly, like many Christian completions of formerly pagan wisdom, Christ is not a god that dies and resurrects periodically. However, a discussion of linear versus cyclical time in Christianity is best saved for another article. What matters to us, yet again, is that the sacrificial and total death of the catechumen was necessary for his rebirth into a pure existence once his or her body was given up into corruption. Baptism is the initiatory death for the Christian, to quote Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:

„When we were baptized into his death, we were placed into the tomb with him. As Christ was brought back from death to life by the glorious power of the Father, so we, too, should live a new kind of life. 5If we’ve become united with him in a death like his, certainly we will also be united with him when we come back to life as he did. 6We know that the person we used to be was crucified with him to put an end to sin in our bodies. Because of this we are no longer slaves to sin.“ Romans 6:4–6

Here we have an important example of a deeply primordial vein that flows and pulses through Christianity. The baptism into water constitutes a reabsorption into the waters of Creation, a symbolic return to the chaos before cosmic order. That is, the former life becomes completely annihilated. However, the dissipation of the former individual into chaos cannot last, as Christ Himself descended and arose from Death, or annihilation, to illustrate the new life promised to Christians. In antiquity there existed a notion, perhaps a prophetic vision, of this future cosmic example. These rites are also alluded to by the great philosopher of antiquity, Plato:

„The founders of the mysteries would appear to have had a real meaning, and were not talking nonsense when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For ‘many,’ as they say in the mysteries, ‘are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics,’ – meaning, as I interpret the words, ‘the true philosophers.’“¹

Plato gives us a tantalizing glimpse at some of the contents of these mysteries. What is particularly interesting is the line about there being few mystics, but plenty who pursue the mysteries. In modernity, where many times we find ourselves interacting more with men who have been modeled after machines than actual men, this seems to be especially prescient. Many beat upon the drum of the “Great Books”, as if the word were enough to be transformed and changed. What modernity claws and grasps for is meaning, and the rites to be initiated into a new meaning. In the previous age, ideologies fulfilled that hole, for a brief time. The New Age had its heyday, and then was ingloriously exposed as a hoax. Everytime modernity reached out its gnarled claws, another vein in its withered arm went cold.

Fittingly, we are stuck in a closed circuited system. The means for removing the old, or rather the corrupted, have been stolen for the majority who have no true belief in religion.² Death, again, was the ultimate purification. Death was never the end, but the means for new life to flow into a sacred cosmos. Even death, however, and the ability to conquer and die well has essentially been stolen from modern man. You may experience the simulation of dying, perhaps over and over again. In our endless wisdom we have even replaced the need for death in initiation. As a modern man, I may recreate myself with a simple purchase. Clean, safe, manageable, I buy my own meaning. Eventually, I will just continue in my peaceful automation as an uploaded consciousness, finding myself as I am deprived of my own humanity. We thought that modernity would forever populate our universe with Lovecraftian horrors. Now, that dreaded silence has settled, we yearn even for cosmic horror. At least then something would matter.

Would any reader might be wondering at this stage is where we might find rites of initiation today? To be sure, the most readily available rites of initiation for the modern man are those of Christianity. The sacraments of the Universal Church are some of the most accessible rites afforded to modern man, an initiation into final death and new life that he has consummately rejected. The project of our age, which we will not see to fruition because our generation has been chosen as one of transition, is to give man his meaning back.

To this end, we look once again to a greater generation. The men of the Renaissance had, perhaps, one of the most astute understandings of who and what man was in relation to his cosmos. Created by God in His infinite wisdom, the great Pico della Mirandola lauds the nature of humanity in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, saying that God created man to be able to descend and transcend himself. Unlike the angels, he is able to reach a knowledge of the divine and mystical experience through his created body. Unlike the animals, man is able to lift his eyes to the heavens and ascend through the celestial ranks, even to be the judge of angels. This vision of humanity is one that centers the goal of human life as union with God through the pursuit of wisdom and the completion of the arts. Pico goes further, enumerating in his litany of great spiritual figures the likes of Moses and Zoroaster. Like them, we must become purified by pure philosophy, make ourselves worthy for that final ascension which is the mystical union of the intellect with God. Every new piece of wisdom or holy knowledge is counted as another rung on a divine ladder toward the Holy. Pico’s exhortation is to participate fully in the marriage between theology and moral philosophy.

More broadly, The Renaissance embraced what is called a “macrocosm-microcosm” understanding of humanity. Man and his constituent parts were mirrored in the cosmos. To paraphrase alchemical scholarship, the cosmos and man are both reflections of God, and are thus in turn reflections of each other.³ This understanding rose from a broadly Platonic and Hermetic Christian cosmology of the world, two intertwined traditions responsible for much of the explosion of high civilization during the Renaissance. The most important blending of both traditions were borne out through the practice of alchemy, both spiritual and technical.

Alchemy, with its own varied forms of initiation, was the foremost of all sciences. Within the context of the Hermetic tradition, alchemy was the manifestation of perhaps one of the grandest initiation rites in the history of Christian Europe. Alchemical symbolism and allegory was naturally influenced by rites historically associated with metallurgy and smithing, while having a distinctly inward spiritual turn. Certain initiatory passages found in the works of the ancient Greek alchemist Zosimos very closely parallel Siberian shamanic initiatory experiences, more specifically the violent spiritual dissection of the practitioner or neophyte into his constituent parts.⁴

More archaically, one may look at the various myths surrounding the symbolism of the deep Earth as a sort of womb, pregnant with iron ore that only awaited the creative power of the metallurgist to extract it from its chthonic abode and complete the natural processes of nature. This immediately suggests a plethora of mythological motifs to the imagination, from the descent of Orpheus to the underworld, the occultation of Zalmoxis, and even the Allegory of the Cave. In the same way that the fire of the forge burnt and dissipated impurities from metal, so the process of initiation into Hermetic wisdom purified the alchemist. The imagery and symbolism of the divine furnace becomes analogous to the human body, the furnace burns away the material impurities while the spiritual impurities are burned from the interior man. The alchemical maxim of dissolve and coagulate comes to mind here, the dissolving of the former husk and the permanence of a new spiritual life.⁵

While we certainly concern ourselves here with some material aspects, it is important that our current age of quantity and material does not occlude a proper understanding of the holistic nature of what sort of man pursued alchemy. First and foremost, this man was a philosopher. Not a sophist like Hume or an unreasonable contrarian like Spinoza, but to quote Eugenio Garin:

„…he was a restless seeker… Like Alberti or da Vinci; he denied consecrated truth like Pomponazzi; he yearned for arcane truths and mysterious revelations like Ficino. He was a magician like Cornelius Agrippa, a prophet of universal peace like Erasmus, a physician for a body in harmony with the forces of nature like Paracelsus, or a witness to the truth like Giordano Bruno.“⁶

How different our own era would be if all who called themselves philosophers attempted to reflect even a little of what made the philosopher of the Renaissance truly a full human. This was, after all, the message of Hermetic philosophy, hand in hand with the work of alchemy. If alchemy was the perfection of nature through the handiwork of man, Hermetic philosophy provided the adept with a means of inner development. With the rise of both of these streams fueled by the translations of Platonic works by Marsilio Ficino, the civilization of the Renaissance was able to reject the assumed antipathy of matter and spirit, man and body, nature and nous.

Alchemy with its wide array of symbols promised to lead the practitioner back to the condition of Eden, the eternal return through perfection of nature. Interestingly, despite leaving a large corpus of works, many alchemists protected their thoughts and ideas by insisting on oral transmission of their most arcane knowledge. Much like Plato, there existed both practical and spiritual reasons for being suspicious of the written word. In a time where everything typed, including this article, is at risk of being twisted and stolen by artificial intelligence, there may yet be wisdom in not revealing everything on paper.

Of course, there exist false alchemies, darkened and disfigured versions of a royal art. Wisdom and intelligence has been usurped by quantitative knowledge and the aggregation of data, in a twisted mockery of the ancient mysteries. In many ways, however, modernity is the painful initiation rite. Full of pits and distractions, thousands of false paths through which many are deceived or led astray. Modernity reveals itself as greed, under the guise of progress. Not material greed per se, but the greed for data. Every corner of the universe must be explored, explained, and catalogued. Tombs are meant to be ripped open, temples are meant to be plundered so that we might dominate all within creation.

Perhaps this has not been more aptly demonstrated than in the recently unveiled massacre of books by certain artificial intelligence organizations. Knowledge is no longer earned and given to those that seek, but butchered for mass consumption. Much of the work of the alchemists, Hermeticists, or in Garin’s terminology, “the new philosophers” was in reaction to the perceived chains foisted upon the spiritual and intellectual world of medieval Europe by the Scholastics and Aristotelian thought. It was a rebirth of their understanding of classical wisdom and sacred knowledge. Aristotle and his philosophy were derisively referred to by the alchemist and physician Paracelsus as „a fungus, a growth, and a boil“.⁷ The distaste for Aristotle among the luminaries did not end there, with the famous alchemist Cornelius Agrippa referring to Aristotle’s philosophy as „pestilential“.⁸

What lesson might the dreamer of a new Renaissance take from this? That while tradition is the living word and wisdom from those great men who came before us, their wisdom is ever in danger of being fossilized and turned into a museum exhibition.

Indeed, alchemy itself was a sacred technology, in the original sense of the word. It cannot be emphasized enough that the modern understanding of “technology” is a bastardization and false mirror of its original form. This is no product of the evolution of language, nor the banishment of superstitious connotation. Rather, the labyrinth of associated symbols and terms that modernity has foisted upon “technology” constitutes a subversion of technology. What was once the sacred art of revealing that which is hidden became the primary mode of obfuscation and spiritual enslavement. The symbols associated with modernity and its false technology are those of simulation and artifice. Artifice here belongs not to the work of the smithy or the sacred art of the carpenter, but rather to the idol of progress.

Technology, in its varied forms, might be understood as a counter-Renaissance. Modernity in its varied forms suggest a perverted reassessment of the goals of the Renaissance: gemstones that once harnessed “sympathetic” forces in nature utilized to summon machine intelligence; transhumanism offered through the removal of a limb or the uploading of consciousness; technology not as revelation, but as concealment of reality. It is not the dark, illiberal counter-enlightenment that some might hope for, although it is certainly a gibbering, howling thing of the night.

We were born malnourished, and yet a feast lay before us. Artificial intelligence only promises false vitalism, and its reality can only be virtual. The individual that puts his faith in artificial intelligence can only be said to be renting his own life out to a false hope, almost like expecting his own consumption of pornography to be analogous to a loving marriage. Smoke, mirrors, and vapor are all that constitute the promises of artificial intelligence. Of course, one should not be dismissive of this movement and its acolytes. There are many incredibly intelligent and truly evil personalities that advocate for the sublimation of the human spirit and its absorption into a virtual reality.

Perhaps the one thing that might be said of AI is that it has caused an explosion of human imagination, the art of which was lost at the first spark of the diesel engine. Because modern man has essentially detached himself from sacrality, he has naturally shut himself off from initiation, thinking that he is alone able to bear the burden of time. What he can never, what we can never truly shut ourselves off from is the desire to transcend our own condition. A desire to be something greater is what makes us who we are. The deepest spiritual desire for man is for his death to mean something. If the passing of this life with its hardness, its sorrow, and its vanity means something, then all is not lost. It never has been!

The very same re-birth that animated the Renaissance is possible in our day and time. A vision for a new West must be pursued in the depths of mysticism and the heights of spiritual exaltation. The arts, the original technology, must have a new and vital spirit infused in them. Of course, in many circles, this movement has already begun. The unique inheritance that has been handed down to the inheritors of Western Civilization is a gift, a gift to be stewarded and to be revived.

Returning to the beginning, illo tempore, we see our father. Walking with spear in hand, he has daubed himself with ochre and white paint, and with a leap and a shout he rushes into the woods. His family, our family, watches him recede into the forest, howling and tearing into the underbrush. Another ancestor brings wheat and milk into a cave, and ecstatic cries are heard while fantastical images play on the damp torchlit cavern walls. What begins to unfold before our own eyes are those generations that came before you. In that epoch before historical time, we see flashes of lightning and peals of thunder emit from the vast forest. All at once, every symbol is revealed to us. The world-snake, fomenting chaos with its tail in its mouth as the oceans boil. The heavens and the Earth shake with the trembling of giants and gods dueling, the temples of old are filled with incense. A bronze snake arises in the desert, a Man hung on a tree speaks words of life. A cathedral rises to meet God where once your father ran into the woods to meet the gods of the hunt and the battle. The wall of the cavern is covered with images of those who bear your faith, while candles and incense bear witness to the prayers and belief of millions.

This series of whirling images comes to a halt, it pauses on you, in you. The thunder stops. The lightning does not flash. The bells of the cathedral are halted, the cries of religious ecstasy are silent. Buzzing fills your ears and your lungs and your mind. Not light or dark, but nothing. The entirety of what man once was, of his place in the universe has been laid out before you. The history of nations and peoples clouds your physical vision, while the future in your hands remains tenebrous. The candle that is the soul of man and the future of humanity need not be replaced by the false glow of a screen. The door is there, knock and you shall receive.

Endnotes