The Initiation (*1)

(By Bro. F. Calderoni - R.L. Adriano Lemmi No. 400, Milano, Italy)

(Translated by Bro. Vincent Lombardo)

These notes are meant to be a stimulus to deeper readings and reflection, without further pretenses. The reader will find at the end some useful bibliographic schematic indications, to broaden and deepen the investigation.

Battaglia's dictionary under "Initiation" reads:

"Act or series of acts or ceremonies in which someone is admitted to the knowledge of sacred secrets or occult doctrines or to engage in esoteric rites, or mysteriosophic cults. In other words: Procedure by which someone is accepted into a secret society, or even into a particular social group; affiliation, membership. In religious ethnology, complex of teachings, practices, and ceremonies through which individuals of both sexes, at puberty, are recognized as adults (therefore suited for war or to marry) and gain all prerogatives of this new status (and this custom, which dates back to prehistory, is typical of numerous indigenous cultures of Africa, Oceania, and Americas). – Magical Initiation: one under which certain individuals (sorcerers, shamans, etc.) acquire particular powers and privileges placing themselves outside the social context of their group."

In 1957 Brother Mircea Eliade wrote, "There are [historically] many types and countless variants to initiations, which correspond to different social structures and cultural horizons. But the important fact is that all pre-modern societies - that is, those that were maintained until the Middle Ages in the Western world, and until the First World War in the rest of the world - assign a leading role to the ideology and techniques of initiation.

Initiation [Etymology] is generally considered a set of rites and oral teachings, by which it pursues a radical modification in the religious and social status of the initiates. From a philosophical perspective, the initiation is equivalent to an ontological change of existence. At the completion of the rites and teachings the neophyte lives a life different from before: he has become someone else.

The space limits imposed do not allow us to get into details: but keeping in mind the various ceremonies of initiation, from that of puberty - male and female – of the most primitive cultures to shamans' initiations and secret societies; from the mystic initiations of the most traditional complex civilizations of ancient Greek , Hellenistic and Rome, India and Islam, to the initiatic elements and actual initiations of primitive Christianity, what is most striking is the universal sacred significance of the rite, the universal religiosity of the spiritual changing pursued in the initiate.

The initiate dies to natural life, to life of beast, to be reborn into spiritual life, the sacred. Even the initiations of puberty of primitive cultures have a deep spiritual meaning. Bro. Eliade writes:

"The initiation introduces the neophyte to both the adult community and the world of spiritual values: he learns the behaviors, the techniques and institutions of the adults, together with the myths and sacred traditions of the tribe; the names of the gods and the history of their works. This is not an instruction in the modern sense of the word: the teaching is sacred, and the neophyte becomes worthy of it only at the end of a spiritual preparation. In fact, everything he learns about the world and human existence is not knowledge, in the sense that we give to this concept, of objective information, continuously susceptible to be rectified and enriched. The world is the work of a supernatural Being, divine work and, consequently, sacred in its very structure." Therefore, the invention of techniques, institutions, and social organization is the work of the supernatural, of the civilizing Hero or the mythical Ancestor. "Since man was created and civilized by supernatural Beings," continues Eliade, "his behaviors and the entire scope and his activities belong to the sacred history, which must be jealously preserved and transmitted intact to future generations. Man is what he is because at the dawn of time happened to him the facts narrated by myths. Just as modern man proclaims to be an historical being, the product of the whole human history, the man of archaic societies recognized himself as the result of a mythical history, of a series of events that had occurred at the beginning of time. But whereas the modern man sees the history that preceded him as purely human and, above all, considers himself capable of continuing and perfecting it indefinitely, for the man of traditional societies all that has occurred of significance, creative and important, happened at the beginning, in the mythic time."

Eliade has thus grouped around the concept and notion of initiation what a large group of scholars in the last hundred years has highlighted and explained regarding the thoughts and perceptions in the world of so-called primitive and traditional cultures. Reality, all reality is sacred because were made, invented by the gods: all man's actions themselves are rational and consistent to his proper mode of existence, since they correspond to the divine teachings.

The hunter who goes hunting repeats, imitates the behaviors taught to his ancestors by the Divinity, and therefore his action is sacred. So the farmer, working to get the harvest, and operating efficiently, will have a good harvest, because repeats the liturgy of cultivation taught in mythical times by the Supreme Being.

Indeed, no lawful conduct of the archaic man is devoid of this sacred component: all activities, including physiological, are sacred and are to be conducted according to ritual, according to tradition.

This conception of man and of his being in the world is perpetuated in traditional societies and helps us understand the social organization of castes in several civilizations: the first that comes to mind is India, but the medieval society is also a good example: men of prayer, men of war, and men of work.

The activity of each class (or caste) is sacred work, therefore agreeable to the deity: the partition of society in religious, military, and economic functions ensures social harmony, and its sacredness is the greatest justification in the mind of the protagonists. The medieval man, when his most essential needs are met, does not feel the weight of his lower social status even though servile, because it corresponds to the divine order of things of this world and he, working, perform a sacred function, even if humble - but never secondary.

We see in this context the root of the sacredness of manual work, sacredness that we also find in the origins of our tradition and our Order.

This state of things, or better, this way of conceiving the world tends to disappear in the West with the end of the Middle Ages. We quote again Eliade:

"The originality of the modern man is his novelty in relation to traditional societies, his willingness to consider himself only as a product of history, and his desire is to live in a universe radically desecrated". Therefore, "has been often affirmed that one characteristic of modern world is the disappearance of initiation: a vital part in traditional societies. Initiation is practically non-existent in Western society of our day." Exceptionally, "the only secret movement that has its own ideological coherence, which has a history and enjoys social and political prestige, is Freemasonry; the rest of (modern) organizations with initiatic pretenses are in the majority recent improvisations and hybrid".

In light of what we have said so far, we believe it is not by chance that our roots can be found in the guilds and in the hermetic Neo-Platonism of the Renaissance (*2). And we think it is not by chance that the birth of historical Freemasonry is placed in that seventeenth century which sees the unstoppable acceleration of modern thought and modern evolution of world views, and the position of man in it. We also believe that the state of desecration of our lives and our world, caused by and co-incident with the rise and progress of modern thought, is the greatest problem faced by modern man, for today and even more for tomorrow.

Alienation, despair, insecurity, need of new faiths, albeit mundane, fanaticism inhuman in duration and quantity of human sacrifice caused: maybe, and probably are the fruits of the desecration of our lives.

We believed we could do without the sacred, and replaced it entirely by reason. But it appears increasingly clear to thinkers and scientists of our time that what we call progress and science are essentially technical phenomena, experimental and speculative learning of new ways of transmuting the reality that surrounds us, scientific discovery, as we call it, but not the discovery of ultimate truths. The most enlighten Scientists of today know, and they tell very clearly, that they are not discovering the secrets of the Great Architect, but that they are only designing increasingly sophisticated and effective models of our empirical knowledge, which increasingly enable us to obtain other things from the things that surround us, and to act on them to our profit - or to our damage - if we are not wise. But as to the secret of secrets, the ultimate reason for the world and ourselves, they feel as we do, that we aren't any closer in our time than other men were in other times and civilizations of different character from ours, in traditional civilizations.

However, we know that it would be unhistorical and feel that it would be wrong, perhaps insane, to refuse that which we call modern civilization, for the good that we sense and comprehend in it contained, despite everything. And there is no going back: we see, however, the pressing necessity of a new synthesis.

In this scenario we believe it is essential for today's man, for himself and for his future, to increasingly devote himself intensively to the resacralisation of his life; to reintroduce in his daily life the spiritual values; and to re-civilize himself in the traditional sense. And to do this without losing what the modern age has given him of universal good, beautiful, and great.

At a conscious level we have forgotten that everything is the work of the Great Architect – and this is our problem. But we feel intimately an extreme need to remember that, mostly at an unconscious level, which is stimulated not only by the negative signs we have mentioned before, but also and especially by macroscopic signs, positive sign, so to speak, which we see around us, in literature, visual arts, in certain hypothesis of scientists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, even in some fashions.

By overcoming all mental turbidity, with open minds to transcendence, or from our recent history, we as Masons can, perhaps, because of our origins and our true tradition, make an invaluable contribution to this awareness, this new resacralisation, in this aided and supported by the anti-dogmatism we champion.

Beyond any more or less instrumentation or occasional secular misunderstanding, this can be our task, our reason to exist at the turn of the twentieth and the twenty-first century of our era. But if we hope this to happen, we must on our part always be and become worthy of it.

Consulted Sources:

S. Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, Torino, UTET

Mircea Eliade, Le sacré et le profane, Paris, Gallimard; Mythes, réves et mystères, Paris, Gallimard;

Initiation, rites, sociétés secrètes. Naissances mystiques: Essai sur quelques types d'initiation, Paris, Gallimard;

Rites and symbols of initiation. The mysteries of birth and rebirth, New York, Harper & Row;

La nostalgie des origines. Méthodologie et histoire des religions. Paris, Gallimard

Vallecchi, L'Enciclopedia delle Religioni

René Guénon: Aperçus sur l'initiation, Paris, Editions Traditionnelles;

Initiation et réalisation spirituelle, Paris, Editions Traditionnelles;

Aperçus sur l'ésotérisme chrétien, Paris, Editions Traditionnelles;

L'ésotérisme de Dante, Paris, Editions Traditionnelles;

Etudes sur la Franc-Maçonnerie et le Compagnonnage, Paris, Editions Traditionnelles;

Notes to the translation:

*1 – See also "Initiation, Mystery and Salvation: The Way of Rebirth" by Bro.Dennis Chornenky http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/chornenky.html

*2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonism_in_the_Renaissance


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