Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth

Rating:
Summary: Ian Myles Slater on: Transitions and Rituals
Review: 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.