Initiation Rituals
Traditional tales retain and share ancestral structures of archetypal registers of initiatory practices, pilgrimages and sacrifices, that is, sacred rituals and ceremonies. Be it Little Red Riding Hood on her pilgrimage to bring food to her grandmother through the forest, Sleeping Beauty pricking herself on the spindle and her ecstatic sleep, or Cinderella and her metamorphosis and transformation to go to the ball. These tales hold ancient memories of initiation, transition and regeneration rituals.
In Greek, "coming home" is called nostos, and it speaks of the return to the conscious mind just by waking up, re-emerging from parallel worlds, which alludes to the ancient pattern of initiatory shamanic journeys. Mircea Eliade says that in archaic and traditional religions, ecstasy means that Souls wander through the sky, that they walk the earth, or that they descend into the underground world of the dead, ritual or symbolically equivalent to a descending ad infernus, always for initiation into the secret mysteries — transcendent and immanent journeys. Pythagoras himself was initiated in Crete into the mysteries of Zeus, spending twenty-seven days wrapped in an animal skin.
In fact, even the metamorphoses into animals, so present in traditional tales, belong to the oldest strata of oral tradition, going back to initiatory shamanic rituals and contact with non-ordinary reality, accessing magical landscapes and mythical geographies.
There are magical times in living and cyclical time that open cracks between kingdoms, being powerful portals for performing rituals, such as the solstices or equinoxes, and the full or black moons. There are the great solstice bonfires, still practised a little all over Europe, which refer to sacred ceremonies of ritual illumination by fire, where, in ancient times, pagans scattered ashes of burnt bones on the fields to ensure regeneration. It also recalls the legacy of the tooth fairies, who collect bones, being ancient bone fairies, who take children's teeth as talismans of transmutation and re-integration of life.
The various and diverse initiation rituals, individual or communal, usually speak of renewal, crossing the abysses of mystery and ensuring the continuity of cycles, of life and abundance. They are ceremonies in threshold landscapes, borders of intersection between time and space, between worlds, internal and external, comprising an awareness and perception of systemic and sacred integration with living places, referring to a deep direct, primal and experiential connection with place.
Ancient chthonic-cosmic wisdom knows the etiquette of such rituals, often secret and unmentionable. To retrieve the seeds and keys of transition, whether wisdom or life itself, we must enter the womb's darkness and silence the mind. Entering the sacred underworld implies sacrifices and leaving offerings, for this is the tomb dimension of death, regeneration and the memory of bones.
We Are Hybrid
It is crucial to remember that in this context the place or territory is not equivalent to the borders of present-day nations. The territory is sovereign and governed by its tectonic, geological, topographic and meteorological laws, as well as its biological, cyclical and eco-systemic complexity, which includes all the cultural identities that inhabit or have inhabited it, in bi-directional fertilisation and conquest. I always speak on the basis of the diversity and hybridisation of life itself. The rescue and recreation of this local ancestral wisdom is not about "reestablishing the purity of a homogeneous cultural lineage or race", because this would be a violent reduction of the necessary diversity and hybridisation of life, making ancient cultures and their representation only uniform or "universal", and ignoring the deep, creative and valuable complexity of the processes of each place.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Cosmic-Chthonic Cartographies to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.