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Initiation rites almost always began with a long period of solitude, deprivation, even pain. All the things a parent tries to keep from a child, imposed to teach life’s important lessons. (Photo by SacredLivingInstitute .com)
[This is one of a series of meditations on what we might have learned, and might still learn, from the history of Native Americans about how to live without modern technology and industry, which we may have to do in the near future.]
We modern white Europeans have discarded most of the ways humans have devised to preserve their societies over hundreds of thousands of years. Clans, extended families, true community, ceremonies and rituals promoting awareness of connections among the people, the natural world and the spirit world — all are pretty much gone. Disabling our own society, and destroying the natural world on which it depends, have become the things we do best. If we are to start over, after our ultimate group failure, we must learn again how societies — such as the Native Americans — successfully preserved themselves for thousands of years.
One of the most important — and most universal — of the preservation techniques was the initiation rite. Humans found out early that the span of one lifetime was not enough time to gain wisdom. Elders had to pass on hard-won life lessons to the young, sometimes with stories, sometimes by example, and sometimes with a good hard cuff upside the head. Or, in other words, an initiation rite.
Father Richard Rohr, the world-famous Franciscan proponent of mystical Christianity, has researched initiation rites all over the world and has distilled their content into five essential lessons. They are lessons that it would take an unaided adolescent years to stumble over, and are considered so important that they must be learned before a young man’s life can properly begin. Hence, the initiation rite.
Before we consider what the lessons were, let’s consider for a moment the basic assumptions we moderns impress on our young people to get them off to a good start:
- You are special — no, make that unique. There is no one like you in the whole wide world. Other people are plain and slow and below average compared to you.
- Because you are so special, your life is going to be a breeze. You can be anything you want to be, and achieve anything you set your sights on. Life will reward you for being special, you know, like those trophies you got in school for just showing up, and life will always yield to your control.
- If you control your diet, and exercise, and take your supplements, you will live fore….you will never d….well, you know. No need to talk about that.
Primitive people would have considered it to be child abuse to tell that many lies to a young person. Instead, they devised ceremonies to impress a completely different set of assumptions, first by imposing serious pain and privation. It was their duty, they thought, to introduce young people to suffering because it was going to be a part of their lives and they needed to get used to it. Suffering, they knew, is a great teacher, and anyone who spent their life avoiding pain, even though they would not succeed, would delay too long learning the lessons that it brings.
In Father Rohr’s summation, the initiation ceremony as practiced by most of the humans who have ever lived over most of the time that humans have been around, stripped of minor cultural differences, imparted five fundamental lessons:
- Life is hard. In many Native American rites, the novitiate first had to embark on a vision quest, living alone in the wilderness and fasting until delirium began to produce hallucinations for later interpretation.
- You are not that important. Except as a part of your clan and the People, there is nothing special about you. Fr. Rohr says that all clans recognized that narcissism was a great enemy of the People.
- Your life is not about you. Life is not a car you get to drive wherever you want to go, it’s a huge excursion bus that you were lucky enough to be able to board, and that will let you off at a time and place not of your choosing, because
- You are going to die. And
- You are not in control.
I am not advocating a reinstatement of such initiation rites in our world. For one thing, I fear the legal system would not be able to accommodate it. But I do think, as night falls on the monumental failures of the industrial age, we consider what primitive people taught their children, and what we have been teaching ours. Given our track record, some adjustments might be in order.
Mr. L.,
An excellent essay overall, yet I must point out one huge cognitive presumption that negates the entire effort of the quest for a vision.
The quest is not a search for a hallucination. It is a quest for one’s power and direction. It is uncertain, that one will receive their vision at all. Many don’t.
Visitation of the numinous is disrespected by the orthodoxy of scientism, or if you prefer a Richard Dawkins perspective, disallowed. This creates a cognitive gulf, where the possibility of connecting with the numinous is ridiculed.
Ok, but if you wish to understand the ritual, you should approach it on it’s own terms.
Here is where I point out that Northern Europeans had their own traditions, remarkably similar to the Indian rituals. Once again, that ritual tradition was neither abandoned or set aside, it was exterminated by the Christian church, which was fully supported by a brutal ruling class.
Some day Europeans will develop the courage to face their genuine history, before that is possible, they are going to have to do a lot of hard work.
Absent an initiation by adults of their community many youths find substitutes that are negative for both them and society. Fraternities, gangs and cults are a few examples.
Yes, Mr. Lewis, it boils down to group/tribal/family cooperation where everyone has their part from oldest to youngest. You earned respect by becoming proficient, then masterful at something for which you had a talent. Here and now we get indoctrinated to serve “the system” and to become a single replaceable widget. We see by the results (in the news every day) that we’ve gone off the rails, so to speak, and that all we have left is to witness the eventual crash. Since we rarely cooperate, I doubt we’ll get to “learn any lessons” afterward. Thanks for your thoughtful essay.
“If we do not initiate the young,they will burn down the village to feel the heat”.
Kikuyu teaching.Take a look around;see any “fires”? Having a decade or more directly involved in initiation,I say we ALL should be Advocating for it.The difference it make in human lives is dramatic.One of the worlds largest problems today ,in the entire world,is Boys in men’s bodies,in positions of enormous power.Another proverb from the Dagara;
” The worst tragedy that can befall the village is not fire or flood or drought or disease;
It is children having children”
How rude of me,Tom ,Thank you very much for this piece.The abandonment of Initiation was human’s next big mistake after agriculture.It absolutely must be addressed if we are to have a future.
The myth of the sutainable and just “american indian ” where is the laugh-meter ?! The american indian was just as much of a warmonger and nature exploiting individual as any of us now (or just look at the greed they are displaying given they can exploit special status like casinos etc on indian land today ) except back than they have been lacking the sciences to perfect it . They exterminated the megafauna right after they moved into the americas . They are asians and would have become just as much of a planet destroying race as the chinese or all the other asian hordes are today . Given a little more without the conquest the european they would have caught up and had done the same things as the europeans . This is all to it read here more http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nattrans/ntecoindian/essays/pleistocene.htm
Interesting that this comment (along with a number of others in this series) has nothing to do with either the article it purports to comment on, or with the themes of the series. To the extent that the comment does not refer to anything I wrote, I feel no need to respond to it.
However, it seems significant that the article to which you link in support of your statement “They exterminated the megafauna right after they moved into the americas.” REFUTES that statement. After describing the argunments for the proposition as made principally by Paul Martin (whom I interviewed on the subject for National Wildlife Magazine many years ago), the article you provided concludes: “Martin’s theory that “man, and man alone” was the culprit does not make sense.”
I found the laugh meter.