Vessels of Initiation

Aeterna Saltatus,  cAndrew Gonzales,www.sublimatrix.com

All religion is a construction or story of existence, its purpose, its value, its place in the whole.  The story engages or makes sense to the adherents in various degrees, and shows an aspect of numinosity and power.   Within Western contexts, e.g., Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the stories are associated with faith, which is not an Eastern concept.  The religions of the East emphasize enlightenment, non-attachment, non-violence, and the dissolution of ego.

Initiation into new phases of life is also connected with narrative, and various constructions of cosmological reality.  A reality larger than the tribe and group is evoked: the cosmos itself is engaged in the passage of the candidate to a new life . The ancient symbols of alchemy, as explored by Carl Jung, provide one such vehicle and construction for further investigation.  The path of wisdom in its fully realized context will include the initiation of elders. The origins of the alchemical work point to the importance of initiation for the adept, the practitioner of the art.  Elders and sages are qualified in the mystical arts; the young are never quite ripe enough.  Much has been written about the loss of initiation ritual in the contemporary world, Eliade and others noting the default of adolescent rituals into the pseudo-initiations of gangs and drug-taking.   For the elder and sage, another privation of ritual is noted, as  aging/sage-ing fails to be honored and remembered, defaulting into senescence and loneliness.

The four elements of Empedoclean physics lead us back to the symbolism of four.  The number four stands for completion and wholeness.  In mandalas and in representations of the quadrated circle or world, as in John Weir Perry’s (1991) Lord of the Four Quarters, four has the internal archetypal capacity to evoke the energy of divine sovereignty.  The king presides over a “whole” kingdom by showing his subjects that he holds the four directions in his care.   Standing at the center of the quadrated world, the king undergoes ceremonial death and renewal, in ceremonies that signify the renewal of the year.   Similarly for the feminine archetype, the queen stands at the nurturant center of the life of the tribe.

 Only by recovering the spiritual and symbolic roots that honor the sage and elder (and the processes of becoming sage and elder), can humanity attain a wholeness that will bring about healthy growth into the future.  Initiations that connect the elder to ancestral and transpersonal links are needed, rites that cross generational boundaries and honor those connections.

New rites for initiation of the elders and sages of both gender are needed, with help from all available sources.

References:

     Eliade, Mircea (1958). Rites and Symbols of Initiation (Birth and Rebirth), trans. W. Trask, London: Harvill Press.

Perry, John W.  (1991).  Lord of the four quarters.   Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.