Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (Torchbooks) [Paperback]

Mircea Eliade (Author)

Book Description

Series: Torchbooks | Publication Date: June 1980

Organizing data from cultures the world over, Mircea Eliade, one of the preeminent interpreters of world religion in the twentieth century, lays out the basic patterns of initiation: group puberty rites, entrance into secret cults, shamanic instruction, individual visions, and heroic rites of passage. The vast information assembled here transcends usual scholarship. Eliade always affirms the greater experience in all initiation the indissoluble tie between humans and the cosmos of gods, spirits, animals, ancestors, and nature. As Michael Meade writes in his foreword, Eliade fervently worked at keeping the doors of perception open to the world of sacred symbols and creative ritual. Through his insistence that we are each the necessary inheritors of a vast sacred heritage, he has acted as a spiritual elder and distant mentor to me and many students of myth and ritual. Like an archeologist of symbols, he has unearthed, preserved, and found new meanings in the rites of our ancestors.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 175 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins College Div; New edition edition (June 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061312363
• ISBN-13: 978-0061312366
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,567,356 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ian Myles Slater on: Transitions and Rituals, December 6, 2004

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Ian M. Slater "aylchanan" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (Paperback)

This little book is a translation of a series of half a dozen lectures, with endnotes providing documentation. The history and bibliography are a little tricky. "Patterns of Initiation: The Haskell Lectures of 1956" were delivered at the University of Chicago by Mircea Eliade, a Romanian exile who had been recruited from the Sorbonne to help build up the University's Comparative Religion department. The lectures were composed in French, Eliade's main second language, and the English translation by Willard Trask was published in 1958, by Harvill Press, London, and Harper & Brothers, New York, as "Birth and Rebirth." (I have reviewed the Harper edition, used copies of which are sometimes available through Amazon: the full title, as given there, is "Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture," in The Library of Religion and Culture series.)

The present title, "Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth," was introduced with the Harper Torchbook paperback edition of 1965. (The publisher had meanwhile become Harper & Row; and today is included in HarperCollins.) There was a Harper College Division reprinting in 1980. The current edition, from Spring Publications, has a new Foreword (by Michael Meade), but seems to be otherwise identical.

Meanwhile, a rather different French edition ("a rehandling of the material") had been published as "Naissances mystiques. Essai sur quelques types d'initiation" (Paris, 1959). (That makes three versions and four titles, if you've lost count. And a variety of textually identical editions of the English-language version.)

Eliade (1907-1986) remained connected to the University of Chicago for pretty much the rest of his life. Although from an institutional point of view he wasn't quite the well-organized driving force that had been desired, he continued to produce interesting and exciting work, not all of which has aged equally well. (For a short account of Eliade's life, work, and an evaluation of his place in the twentieth century, see "The Politics of Myth: A Study of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell," by Robert S. Ellwood.)

"Rites and Symbols" is one of a large number of small works by Eliade which stand alongside such monuments of scholarship as "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy," and "Yoga: Immortality and Freedom," and the attempted summation of his views in the three completed volumes of his "History of Religious Ideas."

The material it contains makes it something of a companion to "Shamanism" in particular, giving a more universal context to the initiatory experiences and rituals described there. It deals with ritual responses to "changes of status" in traditional societies, from the commonly recognized "Rites of Passage" (as delineated in Arnold van Gennep's classic book of that name), such as Birth, Adult-hood, and Death, to cultural constructs, such as entry into secret societies, or the company of Gods and Ancestors.

The original lecture-series title, "Patterns of Initiation," is in some ways the best, suggesting at once that Eliade is focusing on recurring themes, rather than unique instances. The more poetic titles, at least of the English-language version, may have been used because a translation of an earlier work had been published already as "Patterns in Comparative Religion."

I think that it remains useful, although according to the classicist Fritz Graf it "remains as superficial as it is dogmatic" ("Magic in the Ancient World," page 264, note 15). I would call it, rather, schematic, concise, and sometimes poorly argued. The documentation, although now obviously rather dated, often is more impressive than the slender body of quotations Eliade provides in his survey of a vast number of times and places. There are also some minor problems with the translation; probably inevitably, with the number of languages involved, in Eliade's own mind as well as the source materials he was using.

I'm not about to give up my aging copy of the Harper Torchbook edition; but Spring Publications deserves gratitude for bringing the book back into print.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars MIrcea Eliade at his Best!, December 2, 2010

By 

Steven Herrmann (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (Paperback)

Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of "William Everson: The Shaman's Call"

Mircea Eliade has written a fantastic work on Initiation that will certainly be of interest to anyone concerned with the transitional passage from childhood to full spiritual maturity in any culture. Here is a famous quote that indicates the tremendous significance of what he is writing about:

Initiation represents the most significant spiritual phenomena in the history of humanity. (3)

The emphasis Eliade places on archaic, or so-called "primitive" societies and their preoccupation with "death" or symbolic "annihilation" of the old existence, or the "child's dying to childhood" (x-xiii) suggests that the experience of dissolution of the structures of the personality into preformed chaos is the way re-birth is experienced at the depth-level of human existence. No one explores this subject more thoroughly than Eliade. The abundance of data he provides to support his hypothesis about three initiation-types is something the reader will not want to miss.

Here is a synopsis: rebirth of an initiate into a "higher" mode of being is transmitted to the culture via "supernatural beings" who reveal the rites and symbols of initiation to tribal groups; such rituals are revealed to shamans or medicine men from the beginning of Time (xiv). The changes induced in the initiate's consciousness are always produced by religious experience (1). The history of religions distinguishes three central categories, or types of initiation that mark the transition from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to full adulthood. The first initiation-type is "obligatory" and this is the "puberty rite" or "initiation into an age group." The second type is the "secret society." The third type of initiation is the vocation of the "shaman" or medicine man (2). The former two categories often occur at any time between latency, adolescence, adulthood, or mid-life; the third type may occur at any time and is typically not available to the rest of the community and reserved for shamans. These three types of initiation have a great deal in common and all might be regarded as varieties of a single class, yet what distinguishes them from one another is the third category that is singled out by the quest or spontaneous election that produces dreams, visions, and especially ecstasy (3). Attempts were made by early anthropologists to regard the shaman's ecstasy as a form of mental disorder, yet, Eliade saw clearly that neither shamans nor medicine men were mentally ill, because all have found a way to cure themselves; thus, the solution to the psychic crisis or illness of the medicine man is that they have found a way to obtain the gift of shamanizing for the tribe. To shamanize is the cure for the shaman's mental disease (88). The initiatory illness or psychopathology of the shaman or medicine man is not viewed as profane, then, nor does it belong to any ordinary criteria of psychological symptomatology, rather, as Eliade points out: the shaman's dying to the profane world and rebirth into the mysteries of the sacred has an initiatory significance (88) for the entire group:

The total crisis of the future shaman, sometimes leading to complete disintegration of the personality
and to madness, can be valuated not only as an initiatory death but also as a symbolic return to the
precosmogonic chaos, to the amorphous and indescribable state that precedes any cosmology. (89)

I used this little book as a reference text during my work under the tutelage of the post-shaman, William Everson in his celebrated course "Birth of a Poet" on the UCSC campus. It was a wonderful help in illuminating the phenomenon of charismatic vocation, which was our central focus during the dream groups and analysis of dream material accompanying the student's entrance into early adult career transitions. I highly recommend this book to any motivated reader. It is a classic that reaches across a broad spectrum of specialized fields, including religious studies, ethnography, religion, comparative mythology and art. I refer to it today as one of the best resources available on this subject, along with Joseph Campbell's The Way of the Animal Powers.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important classic, worth reading, November 12, 2008

By 

Christopher R. Travers "Einhverfr" (Chelan, WA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (Paperback)

In this work, Eliade explores the general approaches to initiation found among archaic cultures and how these have survived or not in historical traditions. While the work can in no way claim to be complete, it is a classic in its field, like so much of Eliade's work.

Eliade utilizes a comparative methodology in looking for universal or nearly universal patterns in comparative religion. Here he looks at archaic initiation ceremonies in the Americas, Australia, and Africa, and compares these with India, Christianity, and historical Greece. The general parallels in symbolism and patter that he shows are quite meaningful and can help people understand related topics.

Highly recommended for anyone studying this topic.