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Rites and Symbols of Initiation

Book by Mircea Eliade · 2 quotes · Awakening, Rites Of Passage, Birth From Spirit

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Rites and Symbols of Initiation Quotes

“As we said before, initiation lies at the core of any genuine human life. And this is true for two reasons. The first is that any genuine human life implies profound crises, ordeals, suffering, loss and reconquest of self, "death and resurrection." The second is that, whatever degree of fulfillment it may have brought him, at a certain moment every man sees his life as a failure. This vision does not arise from a moral judgment made on his past, but from an obscure feeling that he has missed his vocation; that he has betrayed the best that was in him. In such moments of total crisis, only one hope seems to offer any issue-the hope of beginning life over again. This means, in short, that the man undergoing such a crisis dreams of new, regenerated life, fully realized and significant. This is something other and far more than the obscure desire of every human soul to renew itself periodically, as the cosmos is renewed. The hope and dream of these moments of total crisis are to obtain a definitive and total renovatio, a renewal capable of transmuting life. Such a renewal is the result of every genuine religious conversion.”

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“The interest of initiation for an understanding of archaic mentality lies predominantly in its showing us that the true man-the spiritual man-is not given, is not the result of a natural process. He is "made" by the old masters, in accordance with the models revealed by the Divine Beings and preserved in the myths. These old masters constitute the spiritual elites of archaic societies. It is they who know, who know the world of spirit, the truly human world. Their function is to reveal the deep meaning of existence to the new generations and to help them assume the responsibility of being truly men and hence of participating in culture. But since for archaic societies "culture" is the sum of the values received from Supernatural Beings, the function of initiation may be reduced to this : to each new generation, it reveals a world open to the transhuman, a world that, in our philosophical terminology, we should call transcendental.”

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Book:Rites and Symbols of Initiation
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