Bruce Lincoln
Almost without exception, the papers included in this volume voice reservations and second thoughts about the category of initiation, although some are more thoroughgoing in their skepticism than others. But since there seems to be general — and growing — dissatisfaction, it is worth reflecting a bit on the genealogy of scholarship on this topic.
As I understand it, that genealogy involves three major lines of development, each of which has its own interest and problems. One begins with Heinrich Schurtz’s Älterklassen und Männerbünde (1902) and Hutton Webster’s Primitive Secret Societies (1908), works treating the collective rituals that introduce young men and women into sex-specific age-grade groups in pre-modern societies. Far from symmetrical in their treatment of gender, however, Schurtz (1863–1903) and Webster (1875–1955) focused prime attention on the male groups thus formed, which they saw as the basis of religious, military and political institutions at the level of the tribe that ultimately gave rise to the state.1 German scholars of the interwar period, picking up on similar ideas in Nietzsche,2 found this latter point attractive and many saw cultic bands of ecstatic warriors as something characteristic of the Germanic people and their primordial (i.e. “racial”) ancestors.3 Moreover, in paramilitary groups like the Freikorps, Wandervögel, SA, SS, and Hitler Jugend, they saw contemporary echoes of this process.
A number of authors, particularly Lily Weiser (1898–1987), Otto Höfler (1901–87), and others who trained under Rudolf Much (1862–1936) at the University of Vienna were concerned to locate such patterns and processes in Germanic antiquity as reported by Tacitus and reflected in Old Norse literature.4 Following their lead, others sought to identify warrior initiation and martial cult-groups in the mythic prehistory of other “Aryan” (or Indo-European) peoples, a project in which scholars outside Germany also cooperated. Among these, one could cite the work of several Swedish Iranists at Uppsala University (where Höfler taught from 1928–31),5 Marie-Louise Sjoestedt (1900–40) on the Celts,6 Georges Dumézil (1898–1986) on Rome,7 and Henri Jeanmaire (1884–1960) on Greece.8 Works of this sort have had lasting influence on the mythopoetic men’s movement of Robert Bly (1926–) and others who play at recuperating an aggressive masculinity in a post-feminist era. More seriously, Jeanmaire and Dumézil had importance for Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s Chasseur noir (1981), a work of an entirely different political character, for all that it too occasionally revels in the Nietzschean freedom, energy, and violence of the young men’s societies typified by the Spartan krypteia and Athenian ephebia.9
A second line of discourse on intiation, which interacts at points with the first, begins with Réné Guénon (1886–1951), Julius Evola (1898–1974), and other authors who styled themselves “traditionalists” devoted to the preservation and advancement of philosophia perennis. Taking their initial lead from the importance initiatory rituals had for older generations of occultists and esotericists,10 these authors went further and railed against the modern world’s decadence, salvation from which, they argued, could be obtained only through secret ancient wisdom, as preserved in a few privileged venues.11 Although they differed about which groups actually possess such gnosis, all those of this school — which includes also such figures as Henri Corbin (1903–78), Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), and Frithjof Schon (1907–)12 — shared a general disdain, even contempt, for modernity and a belief that the world’s fate depends on a spiritual elite, constituted as such largely through rituals of initiation that test and transform them ontologically, thereby qualifying them for access to esoteric knowledge.
Writings of this sort circulate largely outside the academy among discontented spirits and religious seekers who delight in submission to spiritual masters. Irrationalism and authoritarianism are redolent in the works of both Guénon and Evola, the latter of whom actively promoted a mystic style of fascism.13 Both authors have enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years, with a steady stream of translations and re-editions of their works making their way into New Age and New Right bookstores.14 Beyond this, their ideas also gained a slender foothold in the academy through the agency of Mircea Eliade (1907–86), who made his American debut with a series of lectures on initiation that drew heavily on the traditionalists’ ideas, while never citing them directly.15
This erasure reflected Eliade’s practice in the postwar period, although in the 1930s Eliade drew many of the key concepts he would employ thereafter from the writings of Evola and Guénon, which he cited and reviewed with enthusiasm.16 Both before and after the war he also had direct contacts with Evola, who wrote to him on 15 December 1951 as follows:
It is striking that you take extreme care not to mention in your works any author who doesn’t strictly belong to the most officious university literature, while one finds not a single word on M. Guénon, nor on other authors whose ideas are much closer to those that permit you to orient yourself securely in the materials you treat.17
Although Eliade’s response has not survived, Evola wrote again sixteen days later, having obviously heard from him in the meantime.
As for your clarifications regarding your relations with the academic ‘Masonry’, I find them satisfying enough. This would be less a question of methodology than a pure tactic, and one can say nothing against the attempt to introduce several ‘Trojan horses’ into the citadel of the university.18
These letters have been much discussed, along with several others in a similar vein.19 Some, particularly authors sympathetic to Evola and Guénon, take Eliade to have been disingenuous: a timid man, afraid to cite his real masters by name, and wishing to deflect their rightful objections. Others take seriously his self-understanding as one who would infiltrate the academy and unleash ideas antithetic to its hegemonic liberal values. Both positions strike me as extreme. Rather, I am inclined to read Birth and Rebirth: the Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture (1958), the book based on his Haskell lectures of 1956, as a seriously conflicted work, alternately bold and hesitating. If one of its multiple purposes was to mainstream the traditionalists’ position, as seems likely, it did so only half-heartedly, as this came in conflict with other projects Eliade was simultaneously pursuing.
The book thus begins with an assertion consistent with the positions of Guénon and Evola, but one that Eliade carefully avoided making in his
It has often been said that one of the characteristics of the modern world is the disappearance of any meaningful rites of initiation. Of primary importance in traditional societies, in the modern Western world significant initiation is practically nonexistent.20
Eliade’s use of the term “traditional” here, as elsewhere, is also worth noting. Appearing frequently throughout the book, it seems near-synonymous to “premodern,” which he defined as denoting Europe to the end of the Middle Ages and the rest of the globe until World War I.21 On one occasion, however, Eliade employed “traditional” in close juxtaposition to “pre-Judaic,”22 and he always left the former term sufficiently unspecified to permit anyone so inclined to understand it as also including contemporary “traditionalist” groups, as in the following passage.
It is to this traditional knowledge that the novices gain access. They receive protracted instruction from their teachers, witness secret ceremonies, undergo a series of ordeals. And it is primarily these ordeals that constitute the religious experience of initiation — the encounter with the sacred. The central moment of every initiation is represented by the ceremony symbolizing the death of the novice and his return to the fellowship of the living. But he returns to life a new man, assuming another mode of being. Initiatory death signifies the end at once of childhood, of ignorance, and of the profane condition.23
For all intents and purposes, this could be a description of Masonic lodges or occultist groups promising ontological transformation through intiation into ancient sacred wisdom. Throughout his discussion, Eliade stressed just this aspect: the production of a “new man” by ritual means.
The book is organized to treat initiatory rituals of varied types in an order that seems to suggest increasing complexity, value, and perhaps also historic development. Starting with puberty ceremonies of “primitive” peoples (pp. 1–60), it moves to the qualifying exploits of heroes and warriors (pp. 61–85), ordeals of shamans and religious virtuosi (pp. 85–102), then Mystery cults and patterns of initiation in “higher” religions (pp. 103–21). Ultimately, Eliade argued that “the final triumph of Christianity put an end to the mysteries and to the initiatory Gnosis,”24 after which he returned to the traditionalists’ problematic: the situation of a modernity bereft of initiation (pp. 122–36). And here, where one might expect him to play the “Trojan horse” most aggressively, he failed to do so with any consistency. Rather, gesturing rapidly in several contradictory directions, he attempted to be all things to all people, while providing an upbeat closure for his lectures and volume. Having just argued that initiation is lost, he found it — or at least its meaningful traces — in all sorts of places: artisans’ guilds, secret societies, and occultist circles, to be sure, but also literature, movies and works of art, dream experience, psychotherapeutic practice (esp. that of Jung),25 even the vicissitudes of normal existence, since “any genuine human life implies profound crises, ordeals, suffering, loss and reconquest of self, ‘death and resurrection.’”26 Clearly, Eliade’s view of modernity was much more optimistic than that of Guénon, who saw it as the last phase of the Kali Yuga.27 But he also took care to blur this difference, using the modifier “genuine” to signal that some human lives are not “genuine” at all, particularly in modernity. In which case, initiation — even of this most rudimentary sort — is once more construed as the diagnostic mark that divides a profane, inauthentic modernity from its categoric opposite, available to all in the past, but in the present only to a privileged few.
Yet a third lineage of discourse on initiation, and one much more intellectually defensible than either of the others, is that which descends from Arnold Van Gennep’s Les rites de passage (1909), a book best approached via its complex relation to the work of Emile Durkheim. As is well known, beginning in the late 1890s, Durkheim (1858–1917) first theorized religion not as a set of beliefs (animism, totemism, dynamism, henotheism, for example), but as the effective vehicle through which social groups constitute and maintain themselves as moral communities.28 Consistent with this, he and his students then treated rituals of varied types as instruments through which groups evoke, model, and renew the sentiments of affinity on which the social depends.
As I understand it, Van Gennep (1873–1957) offered an important corrective to this paradigm, but one he articulated imperfectly and which, perhaps as a result, the Durkheimians were unable to appreciate. Neither by his training, nor by his personal associations was Van Gennep part of the Durkheimian circle, whose members waged a determined campaign in the early years of the twentieth century to create a place for themselves and their views in French academic life. As Van Gennep put it some years after the fact, “Anyone who was not a member of their group was a ‘marked man.’”29
Such bitterness came of experience. In one of his first publications, Mjthes et légendes d’australie (1906), Van Gennep had dared to voice criticisms of Durkheim, which the latter’s students found disrespectful. Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) replied in a sharp review published the following year, just as the two men were rivals for a chair in ethnography and history of religions at the Collège de France.30 Both were unsuccessful, as things turned out, but not equally so. Thus, Mauss was second in the balloting (to Jean Réville [1855–1908]), while Van Gennep placed last of the five candidates, failing to garner a single vote. His candidacy had been tepidly advanced by the great linguist Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), who was better disposed to Mauss in the last analysis, but who said of Van Gennep on that occasion: “Il est bien préparé à l’enseignement de l’histoire des religions et fait sur ce sujet des recherches personnelles de valeur.”31
Such “recherches personnelles” gave rise to Les rites de passage,which appeared in the wake of this election.32 In its pages, one can perceive the humiliated candidate reasserting his worth and demonstrating the original contributions he was prepared to offer. Here, it was his merit to recognize for the first time that a host of seemingly disparate rituals — initiations, weddings, investitures, birth ceremonies, funerals, etc. — all translate people from one social status to another. Going further, he observed that as a result of this common purpose, such ceremonies also share the same patterned schema or structure, involving a sequence of three stages: 1) rites of separation or pre-liminal rites that remove people from their prior status; 2) rites of transition or liminal rites that subject them to transformative operations inside a symbolic border zone; and 3) rites of reaggregation or post-liminal rites that reintroduce them to society and insert them in new stations.
Notwithstanding the logical elegance of this schema, Van Gennep advanced his argument in the style of Frazer, introducing countless repetitive examples, all of which he treated superficially. This aspect of his work, which was tied up with Van Gennep’s disciplinary identity as a folklorist, let the Durkheimians and their descendants dismiss him as having insufficient interest in, or grasp of, sociology to cash in on the possibilities he uncovered. But it also seems possible to me that Van Gennep deliberately left aspects of his analysis underdeveloped and subtextual, precisely because these posed a serious challenge to Durkheimian theory, which he wished to play down in order to avoid further estrangement.33 In contrast to those of Durkheim’s équipe,he implicitly understood the social not as a solidary phenomenon, held together by moral sentiments and periodic bursts of ritual effervescence, but as a hierarchic system marked by internal divisions, many of them associated with the life cycle. Kites de passages,then, he understood as instruments for moving people through a ranked series of discreet stations and one can go further still to argue that the rites also effectively constitute those stations and the distinctions among them.
While Van Gennep’s intervention could — and should — have prompted a productive exchange with the Durkheimians, this never happened. In a somewhat condescending review, Mauss acknowledged aspects of his rival’s contribution, but faulted him for his loose comparatism and his tendency to see the same pattern everywhere. Beyond this, he focused critical attention on the three-part schema, particularly its liminal phase. Mauss’s own researches had led him to treat rituals in terms of the opposition between sacred and profane. Working with these categories, he distinguished “positive” rituals — consecration and the like — that moved subjects from the profane into the sacred, and “negative” ones that returned them to a profane life, transformed by the experience.34 To separate one’s self from one realm, he argued, was necessarily to enter the other, with no “liminal” space between them. The state of being a novice, a fiancée, or a corpse, for example, was not an interstitial condition in his view, but a status itself (albeit transient), marked as sacred by the heightened social interest attached to it.35
Mauss’s critique of Van Gennep frames an intriguing problematic: when and how can a social “no-where” be configured as a privileged “some-where:” a vital, dynamic space of transformation, invested with the aura of the sacred? How and when is such a some-where constructed as a radical no-where: an anomalous, amorphous betwixt and between? For decades, however, such questions went begging. Frozen out of French university circles, Van Gennep taught for a brief time in Switzerland (1912–15), then made his career outside the academy, working within the state bureaucracy and writing encyclopedic works of limited theoretical ambition on French ethnography and folklore.36 His influence was not nil, but it paled beside the Durkheimians’ and his work remained little known outside France until it was championed by Max Gluckman and Victor Turner, starting in the late 1950s.
As Professor of Social Anthropology at Manchester University, Gluckman (1911–75) worked largely within that version of the Durkheimian paradigm that was English structural-functionalism.37 But as someone born and trained in South Africa, a Jew and a Marxist, he strained against some of its core tenets. In particular, Gluckman found it impossible to accept Durkheim’s stress on social integration as the whole story. Tension and conflict being omnipresent in social life — as his South African experience taught him — they needed to be acknowledged and theorized adequately. Struggling to reconcile this perspective with Durkheimian orthodoxy, he argued that conflict was not necessarily antithetical to cohesion and solidarity. Rather, it could actually foster social unity if handled successfully, as in elections where rival parties compete for the same offices under the same system of rules and, as a result, reaffirm their commitments to and belonging in the same politico-moral community. Two institutionalized forms of practice struck him as particularly effective for the recuperation of conflict into social unity. Within modern societies, he argued, law performs just this service, while in pre-modern settings, ritual does much the same.38
Although Gluckman carried out some pioneer studies of ritual,39 his training was in law and legal anthropology became his prime area of activity. Accordingly, he charged Turner (1920–83), who worked under him first at the Rhodes-Livingston Institute and then at Manchester, with following through on ritual. Turner responded in superlative fashion and his dissertation on the ceremonies of the Ndembu people of central Africa remains the most thorough, perceptive, exquisitely nuanced, and analytically masterful study of ritual that has ever been written.40 Neither Gluckman nor Turner took much notice of Van Gennep, however, until 1959, when Gluckman organized a series of lectures on rites of passage, just as arrangements were being made for translation of Van Gennep’s opus.
Initially, Turner was not supposed to have a role in these lectures, which featured only anthropologists of professorial status: E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, Daryll Forde, and Gluckman himself. But when Evans-Pritchard departed from topic, Gluckman seized the opportunity to slip an essay by Turner (then still a lecturer), into the volume that was ultimately published.41 Even here, Turner made no use or mention of Van Gennep, treating Ndembu circumcision rituals chiefly in terms of their symbolism.42 Gluckman, in contrast, gave Van Gennep the most serious attention he had received to date, although his judgement was quite mixed.43 In addition to the standard criticisms of indiscriminate comparatism, tedious repetition, and inadequate sociological grounding, he added that the three-phase schema did little more than reframe the familiar Aristotelian point that every story has a beginning, middle, and end.44 Further, he suggested that initiation and like rituals were chiefly of interest for historic and contrastive reasons. “In short,” he wrote, “I consider that rituals of the kind investigated by Van Gennep are ‘incompatible’ with the structures of modern life.… Ritual, and even ceremonial, tend to drop into desuetude in the modern urban situation where the material basis of life, and the fragmentation of roles and activities, of themselves segregate social roles.”45
In the years following the Manchester series of lectures, an English translation of Van Gennep finally appeared and started to gain popularity.46 Meanwhile, Turner continued his studies of Ndembu initiation (male and female) and went through numerous personal changes, involving a move from England to America (in 1964, after a year as a visitor in 1961), a full professorial chair, and a shift of allegiance from the Communist party to the Roman Catholic Church.47 Apparently, he read Van Gennep with renewed interest during this period, and in 1964 he presented a paper in which he swept past the objections of Mauss and Gluckman, recognizing previously unappreciated depths and possibilities in Van Gennep’s model.48 Here, he spoke about ritual as an instrument of dynamism instead of homeostasis, and the liminal phase was the centerpiece of his discussion. The following passage summarizes the possibilities he perceived in it.
Jakob Boehme, the German mystic whose obscure writings gave Hegel his celebrated dialectical “triad,” liked to say that “In Yea and Nay all things consist.” Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise. I will not pursue this point here but, after all, Plato, a speculative philosopher, if there ever was one, did acknowledge his philosophical debt to the teachings of the Eleusinian and Orphic initiations of Attica.49
In this essay, Turner theorized the liminal phase primarily as a space for creative reflection, where individuals stripped of their prior identities can imagine themselves and the world anew. In later writings, he pursued the social implications of the philosophico-theological notion he adapted from Boehme and Hegel, theorizing the liminal as the antithesis of normal life in society: the moment of radical anti-structure that inverts and annihilates old structures and identities, so that new ones can be created. In 1966 he took this analysis further still in his Lewis Henry Morgan lectures. Here, he gave the liminal a Utopian aura, treating it not just as an occasion for reflection and growth, but as a refuge from all considerations of status, a space and time of intimacy, egalitarianism, spontaneity, and humane authenticity: experiences he described with the term “communitas,” which became his hallmark and connoted everything he valued most deeply.50
Of Turner’s four Morgan lectures, three focused exclusively on Ndembu rituals. The fourth, entitled “Liminality and Communitas” was much broader and it was this piece that best caught the spirit of the age and made him an intellectual celebrity. In the book published on the basis of these lectures, a clear caesura is evident between the scholar Turner had been and the one he was fast becoming. Here, the Ndembu material was cut to two chapters (one of the lectures having been dropped), while discussion of the liminal was expanded to three with the addition of two new pieces. Not coincidentally, in the latter section Turner’s exquisitely detailed African ethnographic accounts disappeared in favor of quick romps through more familiar, accessible, and sexier material, including, as he later put it “Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Bob Dylan, and such current phenomena as the Chicago Vice Lords and the California Hell’s Angels.”51
Even more than Eliade, Turner not only succeeded, but actively delighted in finding initiatory phenomena in modern society. In later writings, he would range ever wider (also more impressionistically and irresponsibly), finding liminality and communitas virtually everywhere: theatre, carnival, pilgrimage, religious renunciants, bands of guerillas, and (to cite him again) “shamans, diviners, mediums, priests, those in monastic seclusion, hippies, hoboes, and gypsies.”52 Beneath the surface of his texts there also lay Turner’s experience in London during the Blitz, where, as a conscientious objector to military service, he worked on the squad that defused unexploded German bombs. Facing the constant possibility of death, he and the others in this service shared a camaraderie, intimacy, and deep human bond in which all pretensions of class, rank, and status dissolved. It was this extraordinary experience he sought to recover in his later writings, which captured the imagination of an exuberant era that invented its own forms of communitas at Woodstock, Haight Ashbury, the événements of May ‘68, and other landmarks of the 1960s.
Classicists were no more immune to that spirit than anyone else, and scholarly work on Greek initiatory rituals followed in Turner’s wake. Although Eleusinian and Orphic initiations are a perennial subject of fascination and initiations of other sorts had occasionally been studied, Angelo Brelich gave new impetus to the topic with his bold attempt, inspired perhaps, by early feminism, to recognize women’s initiations in the Brauronia, arrêphoria,and elsewhere.53 Other works quickly followed, culminating in Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s Chasseur noir (1981), inspired by Lévi-Strauss and Jeanmaire as well as Turner and Van Gennep, which treated the ephebia as a state of liminal communitas, located between boyhood and maturity, nature and culture, the raw and the cooked.54
The important chapters that Chris Faraone and Irene Polinskaya offer in this volume point out serious problems with Brelich and Vidal-Naquet, and others have demonstrated the even more grievous failings of other, lesser works. Gloria Ferrari and David Leitao offer novel and fascinating insights into less studied and less appreciated rites of passage, but one senses them to be swimming against the tide. Interest is fading in initiation, and given the genealogy I have traced above, it is hard not to sympathize.
The situation we now observe, however, seems less a paradigm shift than a change in fashion, accompanied and assisted by generational succession. For those who came of age in the 1960s, coming-of-age seemed a topic of world-shattering import. Turner, Van Gennep, and to a lesser extent Eliade, provided us with theory and language that enabled and ennobled us in that self-absorption. But as we boomers become geezers, age-transitions threaten us more and fascinate us less. As for those who are in the course of succeeding us, the topic of initiation holds limited interest. Although they may sense this only vaguely, its excitement (such as it is) radiates from a mythical moment they know only via the tired stories of their elders, whose work on this topic is ripe for critique.
If further studies are to improve on the flawed existing literature, I would think three corrections are in order. First, we should put an end to any lingering notions that initiatory rituals can produce transformation that is properly called ontological. Rituals can and do effect promotions within cultic and social hierarchies, while also producing desire and readiness for such mobility, as well as pride and satisfaction in its accomplishment. But insofar as ritual, scholarly, or any other discourse claims that ceremonies elevate human subjects to higher states of being, this should be recognized as mystification.
Second, we ought deromanticize discussions of liminality and recognize that there is nothing necessarily liberatory anti-structural, or communitarian about this stage of a ritual process. Asymmetries of power and status do not evaporate in the liminal period. Rather, as even Turner was forced to admit, a condition of the communitas experienced among novices is the absolute authority elders exercise over them.55 As in Marine boot-camp (itself a form of initiation in the modern world), in many initiatory rituals authority is reduced to its simplest, bluntest, and potentially most brutal form: a sustained confrontation between those who give orders and others who are categorically obliged to submit, no matter how (literally) degrading those orders may be.
Third, there is need to fill in the sociological analysis left unfinished and subtextual in Van Gennep. This requires a significant analytic reorientation, for his approach implicitly assumed the perspective of individual initiands, as a means to chart their journey from one social status — and ritual phase — to another. Much has been learned from this, but we have long since reached the point of diminishing returns. As a complement, it would now be useful to adopt a macrosocial perspective so we can appreciate the way rites de passage regulate supply and demand, such that the relative difficulty of access to specific social stations varies directly with their perceived (and constructed) level of desirability. Conceivably, research of this sort should prove invaluable in helping us theorize the ritualized political economy of status in pre-modern societies. But that is a very large undertaking.
1 Schurtz (1902) and Webster (1908). For recent discussions of the import of these works, see Völger and von Welck (1990).
2 Nietzsche’s discussion of the Dionysiac in The Birth of Tragedy is relavant here, but the most important single passage is found in Geneaology of Morals II §17, where he argued, pace notions of social contract, that the state originated with “some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad.” [irgendein Rudel blonder Raubtiere, eine Eroberer- und Herren-Rasse, welche, kriegerisch organisiet und mit der Kraft, zu organisieren, unbedenklich ihre furchtbaren Tatzen auf eine der Zahl nach vielleicht ungeheuer überlegene, aber noch gestaltlose, noch schweifende Bevölkerung legt. Dergestalt beginnt ja der »Staat« auf Erden: ich denke, jene Schwärmerei ist abgetan, welche ihn mit einem »Vertrage« beginnen ließ.] Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale.
3 Of particular importance in this vein were Blüher (1919) and (1924), Hauer (1923) and Baeumler (1934).
4 Of particular importance were Tacitus’s Germania,chapters 7, 11, 13–14, 31, and 43. Cf. Weiser (1927), Höfler (1934). Another member of this group was Richard Wolfram, who studied German sword-dances and folklore in a similar light and, like Höfler, later served in the SS Ahnenerbe. Olof Bockhorn (1988) 68–83, (1987) 229–37 and (1994) 477–526, has written a good deal concerning Rudolf Much and his students. Specifically on Lily Weiser, see Niem (1998) 25–52; on Höfler, Birkhan (1987/88) 385–406, Zimmermann (1994) 5–27, and Behringer (1997).
5 Nyberg (1938; Swedish original 1937) shows these interests, which were developed more fully in works by his students, Stig Wikander (1938) and Geo Widengren (1969).
6 Sjoestedt (1940).
7 Dumézil (1942).
8 Jeanmaire (1939).
9 Vidal-Naquet (1981; English trans., 1986).
10 See, for instance, Arthur Edward Waite (1909), Annie Besant (1912), Rudolf Steiner (1961).
11 See, inter alia,René Guénon (1927), idem, (1946), idem, (1950), Julius Evola (1931), idem (1934) (1964).
12 Corbin (1971), idem (1983), Schuon (1958). On Corbin, see Jambet (1981) and Wasserstrom (1999).
13 On Guénon, see James (1981), Laurant et al. (1985), Faivre (1994) 100–2; on Evola, Sheehan (1986) 279–92, Ferraresi (1987), Gugenberger and Schweidlenka (1987) 129–32, and Wasserstrom (1995).
14 In the last decade, forty-three works by Guénon have been re-published, thirty in English translation (mostly by Sophia Perennis and Universalis of Ghent, NY), two in Spanish, one in Portuguese, and the rest in the original French. For Evola, the figures are: thirty-eight titles total, twenty in Italian (most by the Fondazione Julius Evola in Rome), twelve in English (most by Inner Tradition of Rochester, VT or Oriental Classics of Edmonds, WA), three in Spanish, two in French, one in German.
15 Eliade (1958). This work was written in French, but first presented in English translation as the Haskell lectures Eliade gave at the University of Chicago in Fall 1956, before joining the faculty. A paperback edition was published under the title Kites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (1958) and the French text appeared as Naissances mystiques: Essai sur quelques types d’initiation (1959).
16 Eliade’s relations with these authors have begun to receive a great deal of attention, especially from Italian scholars. Most fully, see Pisi (1998) 43–133. de Turris (1995) 219–49 and Montanari (1995) are also useful. An excellent discussion in English is forthcoming from Steven Wasserstrom, “Eliade and Evola,” in Elliot R. Wolfson and Jeffrey Kripal, eds., The Unknown, Remembered Gate: Religious Experience and Hermeneutical Reflection in the Study of Religion (New York: Seven Bridges Press, forthcoming).
17 Handoca (1993) vol. 1, 277: “Il est frappant que vous avez un souci extrème de ne mentionner dans vos ouvrages aucun auteur qui n’appartient strictement à la littérature universitaire la plus officieuse … tandis que on ne trouve un seul mot pas seulement sur M. Guénon, mais aussi sur des autres auteurs dont les idées sont bien plus voisines à celles qui vous permettent de vous horizonter avec sureté dans la matière que vous traitez.”
18 Ibid., 278: “Pour ce qui regarde vos éclaircissements à propos de vos relations avec la «maçonnerie» académique, je les trouve assez satisfaisants. Il s’agirait alors moins de méthodologie que d’une pure tactique, et contre le tentatif d’introduire quelques chevals de Troie dans la citadelle universitaire on ne saurait dire rien.” Many years later, Eliade (1989) 163 gave a different (and rather self-serving) account of how he responded to Evola’s rebuke: “My argument couldn’t have been simpler. The books I write are intended for today’s audience, and not for initiates.”
19 The fullest discussion is that of Pisi (1998) 73–80, with quotation of other related documents. See also de Turris (1995) 243.
20 Eliade (1958) ix.
21 Ibid. ix–x.
22 The juxtaposition of “traditional” and “pre-Judaic” appears only once, at p. xii, within a paragraph that introduces Eliade’s view that “archaic” or “traditional” societies were oriented toward sacred origins, as narrated in myth, and lacked the kind of historic consciousness that first developed in the Hebrew Bible. For the fullest explication, see Eliade (1954; French original, 1949).
23 Eliade (1958) xii.
24 Ibid., p. 122.
25 Conceivably, Jungian writings should be considered another major lineage of initiation discourse. Along these lines, see the revealing, if occasionally overstated, discussions of Noll (1994) and (1997).
26 Ibid., 135.
27 Montanari (1995) stresses this point, calling attention to the remarks Eliade made in 1978 concerning Guénon (1978: 170): “I read René Guénon fairly late and certain of his books interested me a great deal, especially L’Homme et son devenir selon le Vedânta,which I found very beautiful, intelligent, and profound. But there was a whole side of Guénon that irritated me: his outrageously polemical side and his brutal rejection of all modern Western culture: as if teaching at the Sorbonne sufficed to make one lose all chance at understanding anything. Nor did I like his opaque disdain toward certain works of modern art and literature.” As Paola Pisi (1998) has noted, however, at least part of this statement is a disingenuous attempt to revise the record, since Eliade hardly began reading Guénon late; rather, he first cited the French master in 1927, when he himself was but twenty years old.
28 Durkheim’s significant writings on religion begin with his essay “De la définition des phènomènes religieux,” L’Année sociologique 2 (1899): 1–28. This and other early pieces have been assembled in English translation by Pickering (1994). His magnum opus, of course, is Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912). Although it is convenient to start with Durkheim, he did not invent ex nihilo,but built on suggestions he found in earlier authors, above all Numa Fustel de Coulanges, one of his teachers, and W. Robertson Smith, whose importance he always acknowledged.
29 Quoted in Belmont (1979) 2.
30 Van Gennep (1906). Mauss’s review appeared in the Durkheimians’ flagship journal, L’Année sociologique 10 (1907): 226–9 and has been reprinted in Mauss (1968) 70–3.
31 For discussion of the election, see Fournier (1994) 319–23. The quotation from Meillet is given at page 322, n. 2.
32 Van Gennep (1909).
33 Durkheim himself went unmentioned in Van Gennep’s text. Of the other Durkheimians, Mauss is cited five times, Henri Hubert three, and Henri Beuchat once. Several of these are perfunctory and some quite respectful, but none is polemic.
34 See, above all, Hubert and Mauss (1899) — reprinted in Mauss (1968) 1: 193–307 — idem (1909).
35 L’Année sociologique 11 (1910): 200–2, reprinted in Mauss, (1968) 1: 553–5.
36 On Van Gennep’s life and work, see Belmont (1979). Mauss (1933) 39, reprinted in (1969) 440, grudgingly noted the value of Van Gennep’s later, folkloric researches.
37 On Gluckman, see the discussion of Kuper (1973) 177–88.
38 For development of these views, see Gluckman (1965).
39 The two landmark articles on ritual are Gluckman (1940) and his Frazer lecture of 1952, “Rituals of Rebellion in South and South-east Africa,” reprinted in (1963) 110–36.
40 Turner (1957).
41 Gluckman (1962).
42 Turner (1962).
43 Max Gluckman, “Les rites de passage,” op. cit., n. 12.
44 Ibid. 9.
45 Ibid. 37–8.
46 Van Gennep (1960).
47 On Turner, see Babcock (1984), Turner and Turner (1985), McLaren (1985) and Ashley (1990).
48 The lecture, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage”,was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (March 1964) and was then published as Turner (1964) and in Turner (1967) 93–111.
49 Ibid. 97.
50 Turner (1969).
51 Turner (1974) 53–4.
52 Ibid. 233.
53 Brelich (1969). Brelich had already been interested in these materials before the translation of Van Gennep made its appearance. See the notes from courses he offered at the University of Rome: Brelich (1961a) and (1961b).
54 Vidal-Naquet (1981). Since Le chasseur noir,numerous other works have appeared, including Sourvinou-Inwood (1988), Dowden (1989), Moreau (1992), Sergent (1996), Lada-Richards (1998), Giuman (1999), and Waldner (2000).
55 Turner (1967) 99–100: “It must be understood that the authority of the elders over the neophytes is not based on legal sanctions; it is in a sense the personification of the self-evident authority of tradition. The authority of the elders is absolute, because it represents the absolute, the axiomatic values of society in which are expressed the ‘common good’ and the common interest. The essence of the complete obedience of the neophytes is to submit to the elders but only in so far as they are in charge, so to speak, of the common good and represent in their persons the total community.”