ABSTRACT
In contemporary culture even outside the narrow circle of scholarship, initiation has become, over the last century, a household word. Two citations express our culture's orthodoxy about initiation.When, in Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, the sometimes unruly (and almost immortal) narrator has to introduce some of his sons into sexuality, he makes a short remark: `` Sure, there are rites of passage for males as well as females; every culture has them, even those that aren't aware of it.''1 A much earlier voice has told us why this should be so: `` Initiation may be traced to a period of the most remote antiquity''. Thus the Reverend George Oliver, Doctor of Divinity and Bishop of Shropshire, in the first of twelve lectures he gave on The History of Initiation . . ., Comprising a Detailed Account of the Rites and Ceremonies, Doctrines and Disciplines of All the Secret and Mysterious Institutions of the Ancient World, published in 1840. Initiation rites, then, are part and parcel of human history, they are an anthropological constant going back to our earliest times, and (not the least) they are `` secret and mysterious''. Of course, the learned bishop and freemason had to say no less, since he set out to give the most impressive pedigree possible to his own Masonic ritual predilections. In doing so, he made ample use of the works of earlier scholars ^ not the least of someone whom the Anglican bishop, I assume, would rather not publicly acknowledge as his spiritual father: initiation both primitive and Greek is already present in the two volumes in which the Jesuit Father Jose© phe Franc° ois Lafitau, in 1724, compared the customs of the American savages with those of the first humans altogether.2 The initiation rites ^ les rites initiatiques ^ of the Iroquois and the Hurons which he personally witnessed (the rites so impressively captured, some two centuries later, though in another tribe, in AMan Called Horse) immediately evoked in Father Lafitau thememory of the initiations at Eleusis and sent him unto the slippery path of a diffusionist theory that made them into an important part of early man's religious legacy.3 A glimpse into any of the volumes that record a major
congress on the topic, organized at the university of Montpellier in 1990, can show how much these assumptions are still alive in the studies of Greek and Roman culture and literature.4
