“Initiation usually comprises a threefold revelation of the sacred, of death, and of sexuality.” (Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane)The initiate emerges from the initiating mysteries as one who knows. 

The symbolism of death and (re)birth figures prominently in these mysteries. The initiatory ordeals impress upon initiates the import of coming to age and gaining admission into a society of recognized adults. The painful ordeals make the passage an indelible experience but also convey the existential weight of the secret knowledge that is revealed to the initiate. Knowledge of what is vital is knowledge of pain but also knowledge of the ability to surmount pain and deprivation. Thus the initiate gains both self-confidence and pride in tribal fellowship. The necessary subjugation that forges fully formed subjects is not left to chance.

In a desacralized society, the symbolism of death and birth is unavailable, as is symbolism in general, and rites of passage no longer exist. This leaves each individual to “choose” his or her own identity, now extended to the right of each individual to declare their gender identity. Because these identities are self-conferred with no travail they carry little weight and are as easily cast off as they are put on. Under these circumstances, identity never amounts to anything more than an attitude and one never attains the position of one who knows. One remains a perpetual infant, not to say an embryo, arrested in a lifelong condition of insecure identity, anxiety, and bewilderment. The young are formally enjoined to “grow up” but they are immersed in a disorder that they do not have the means to escape. Their “rights” confine them for a lifetime in a larval stage of boundless but never realized potential.

Religious man conquers the fear of death and acquires the ability to live fully and authentically by assigning death the symbolic meaning of passage: initiation kills the profane and unformed man, who is then reborn as consecrated man, free from the fear of death and, therefore, enabled to live a noble life. Uninitiated, irreligious man shrinks from death and is, therefore, condemned to live a cowardly, compromised, senseless half-life.

This has bearing on why the West is at war with itself and takes pride in demolishing its own traditions, canons, and monuments. A desacralized and diminished civilization cannot tolerate the memory of its sacred origin. The legacy of the past becomes an embarrassing encumbrance putting to shame the spiritual poverty of the present.  But the willful erasure of the past does not prevent it from haunting the present. The sacred persists as a haunting, as the always possible undoing of “progress.”