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This essay was originally written for ADF’s
journal, The Druids’ Progress,
in 1984 c.e. and was naturally focussed on that Neopagan
Druid organization’s needs and evolving customs. Contrasts
and comparisons were made primarily to Wiccan (Neopagan Witchcraft)
patterns of belief and practice, because that was what most Neopagans
might have been familiar with at the time (and this could still
be the case). Nonetheless, the basic principles discussed have
a much wider application than merely the Neopagan or even the
wider Occult/Esoteric/New Age community.
Three Types of Initiation
There seem to be three major approaches to
initiation practiced by various cultures and subcultures around
the world. These approaches are often combined and interwoven.
I have created the following “typology
of initiation” to make the distinctions
and overlaps clear.
Type One: Initiation as a recognition of a status
already gained
The ceremonies of Bar/Bas Mitzvah, Confirmation,
graduation, or ordination, are good examples of this. The basic
idea is to gather the community around you, and to announce that
you have achieved a particular stage of growth, that everyone
recognizes that growth, and therefore you now have certain
responsibilities as well as privileges. These sorts of initiations
are frequently “time-bound,”
that is to say, they happen more or less automatically
when you reach a certain age or have been studying a craft or
discipline for a specific period of time.
Type Two: Initiation as an ordeal of transformation
A mundane example of this would be throwing
you into a pool in order to force you to learn to swim. There
are a wide variety of traditional techniques for doing this in
a ritualistic way, such as making you fast for a week, go without
sleep, be flogged without crying out, be sexually tempted and/or
exhausted, be buried alive or locked in a dark room, go on a
vision quest, be led through a night-long guided meditation,
etc.
Any or all of these techniques may be augmented
by the use of mind-altering substances, depending upon local
traditions, but what they all have in common is that regardless
of the specific techniques being used, the goal is to induce
an altered state of consciousness within which you are forced
to confront Life, Death and your own multiple Selves. While you
are in this state of reality/vulnerability, you are capable of
re-imprinting yourself with a new worldview (or of having one
imposed upon you). This is said to make you a “new
person,” and indeed the commonest
theme in such initiations is that of death and rebirth.
By the way, Robert Anton Wilson has a lot
of good material on imprinting and re-imprinting “tunnel
realities,” (the worldviews we develop from our tunnel visions)
in his Prometheus
Rising (Falcon Press, 1983), which should be in every
Pagan and New Age library.
The emphasis in Type Two initiations on difficulty
is both descriptive and prescriptive: Being born
again into a new worldview and status is not easy, since it requires
giving up (some people say “growing
out of”) your old identity, which is usually based, at least
in part, on your culture’s collection of approved tunnel
realities. Whatever physical or psychological pain might be involved
also serves as a screening mechanism — if you are likely
to buckle under pressure, the tribal elders want to find that
out before you get into a position of responsibility where your
weakness could endanger others. This is a harsh reality to reside
in, but for most of human history it’s been a necessary
one. If we’re unlucky, and Pagans ever have to go back underground,
we’d probably have to return to such attitudes again.
As distinct from Type One, this approach believes
that the purpose of an initiation is to promote or force
the achievement of a new growth stage. Although also often time-bound,
with this sort of initiation it is possible to fail, with consequent
devastating effects upon the body and/or mind of the would-be
initiate. These negative effects are considered the unfortunate
price that must be paid for safeguarding the welfare of the group.
Type Three: Initiation as a method for transferring
spiritual knowledge and power
Obviously, this is usually thought of as flowing
from (or through) the initiator(s) to the initiatee(s). (By the
way, I’m using the term “initiatee”
as distinct from “initiate”
to indicate the difference between someone
going through the process of being initiated vs. someone
who has already been initiated, whether in the near or distant
past.) In the Western mainstream occult traditions, this is often
called the “transmission of the Gnosis”
or the “Apostolic
Succession,” but it has been used
by quite a few different traditions and organizations throughout
human history. This approach assumes that the purpose of an initiation
is to open you up to a source of external power that has been
used by your predecessors.
A properly done initiation of this sort should
have the following results: (a) you are better connected to the
deity who is the group’s magical/spiritual focus, (b) you
are better connected to the spirits of your predecessors, (c)
your internal psychic hardware and software are rewired and reprogrammed
to enable you to handle the group’s flavor of energy better,
and (d) you are given the ability and right to speak and act
as a representative of those predecessors, and thus to fulfill
certain spiritual and/or magical responsibilities.
Initiations in the Neopagan Witchcraft Community:
When Valiente and Gardner were inventing the
modern Craft, they were unclear as to which of these three approaches
they considered the most important. His Masonic background gave
him the idea for the ritual “ordeals”
of being bound and threatened (Type Two). Their
Anglican culture, combined with their desire to be in touch with
those who had supposedly gone before, inspired the idea of
“handing on the Craft” from priest/ess to priest/ess as a Pagan version of
the Christian “apostolic succession”
(Type Three). Masonic rules about minimal times
to be spent between Degrees, folkloric references to “a year and a day” being
a magical span, and the needs of their congregation for a predictable
schedule of promotion, eventually led to general expectations
that everyone would automatically be in initiated/ordained after
they had been in the religion for set lengths of time (Type One).
This motivations could have led to any of
the three types of initiation, but Gardner and Valiente had further
factors to consider. They had to keep each member of their core
group happy with his or her personal progress. Simultaneously,
they had to generate a sufficient number of clergy to reach the
critical mass necessary for survival as a religion. So they decided
that it was most important that the initiations be unfailable
(Type One) experiences, and hoped to do their sorting out of
unsuitable candidates between initiations as part of their training.
Exceptions were made, especially in the early
years, for initiatees who were going to be taking the new religion
elsewhere in the world (mostly the U.S. and Canada, Australia
and Europe) and/or who couldn’t make multiple trips to the
British Isles on a regular basis. For these individuals, Gardner
followed the common Masonic pattern of giving them all three
degree initiations in a weekend or week, trusting them to do
their homework later.
As Gardner’s Mesopagan Witchcraft spread
to America, it’s monarchial leaders had no trouble at first
with American ideals of democracy, because most Americans secretly
are in love with British royalty. But in the late 60’s,
several High Priestesses suffered rude collisions with the counter-culture’s
egalitarianism. They began to be faced with increasing differences
of opinion about the proper purposes and roles of initiation
and hierarchy. The Neopagan/Craft explosion of the 70’s
threw these and many other questions high into the air, and they
haven’t landed yet, though by and large Wiccan initiations
are still darned hard to fail.
It would be interesting to see how other Neopagan
traditions, such as Feraferia, the Church of All Worlds, the
Church of the Eternal Source, etc., who did not receive much
Wiccan influence until the 70’s and 80’s, first conceived
of and performed their initiations.
Ancient and Modern Druidic Initiations
Obviously, we know very little about how the
Paleopagan Druids initiated
their members, but much can be guessed without too much
risk of ancestral giggles. Most likely, the first initiation
a Paleopagan Druid would have received would have been as a baby,
and the subsequent ones would have been those common to all members
of the Druid caste, for they would have been the Druidic caste
variations of the standard rites-of-passage experienced by all
members of their society (just as a child born into the Bramin
caste in India goes through Bramanical variations of the samscaras
experienced by all Hindus).
Most of these would have been Type One initiations.
Those who were raised (or recruited) to become Druidical specialists
of some sort — Bards, Seers, Invokers, Sacrificers, Brehons,
Healers, etc, — would probably also have received particular
initiations designed around the needs of both the initiatees
and the community. These would have been rooted in years of education
and — like taking the SATs or GREs or the Bar Exams —
would have involved Type One and Type Two experiences, leading
to a Type Three investiture of spiritual blessings and knowledge
from their ancestral predecessors.
The Mesopagan Druids,
based on my study of initiation scripts from the turn of the
century and my recent experience of being initiated as a
“Bard, Ovate and Druid” (=3°) in the United Ancient Order of Druids, used
rituals highly similar to those of the Masonic movements. These
included elements from Type One (recognizing the initiatee as
a worthy fellow), Type Two (certain mild ordeals I am not at
liberty to discuss), and Type Three (psychic connection to over
200 years of accumulated “magical
current” from previous Mesopagan
Druids). Like all initiations into fraternal lodges, the rites
are formal and are usually read from books, both because they
are so seldomly performed that no one bothers to memorize them,
and to ensure that exactly the same words and actions are used
as have been used before. I can state firmly that I felt that
current of magical and spiritual power connect to me, even though
the leaders of the rites had little or no formal magical training.
The Reformed Druids of
North America, overlapping the Mesopagan and Neopagan Druids
historically, used less formal versions of Mesopagan-style initiations,
also mixing all three types of initiation. Becoming a
“First Order” Druid
required little save having the courage to ask for the honor.
The Second Order was given to members who had taken on some of
the routine organizational and ritual work of the grove, and
involved an “ordeal”
of drinking an entire glass of the Waters of
Life (Irish whiskey, usually cut with regular water). The Third
Order (the priest/esshood) required good behavior as a Second
Order and an all-night vigil in the woods. All three initiations
included language passing on wisdom supposedly from the Ancient
Druids, and the Third Order included secrets that could only
be discussed with other Third Order Druids.
The first few initiations I performed as a
Druid were the RDNA ones just described, with increasing amounts
of Neopagan polytheology as time went by. When I started ADF, I assumed that most members would
live too far away for me to initiate them personally, so the
First Circle initiation was actually a self-dedication ritual,
including the all-night vigil used by the RDNA for its clergy
ordinations. Eventually, people at festivals I was attending
wished to do their First Circle rites there and have me or some
other senior member of ADF do a blessing at the beginning and
end. Gradually group vigils and more complex rites for Second
and Third Circle Druids were created and employed. Almost everyone
vigiled for their 2nd and 3rd, and many fasted through the night.
We were all blessed by being able, on several occasions, to do
these rites at ADF’s annual festival, in the Sacred Grove
created at Brushwood
by our members.
The training program and initiation processes
for ADF have continued to evolve beyond my tenure as Archdruid.
You should visit the ADF Website
for details about them.
Implications for Future Neopagan Initiatees
If you think of your initiations as recognition
for your hard work (Type One), then you should ask yourself from
whom you wish to receive this recognition. You could gather
together a group of “peers”
(members of your own or neighboring groups) and/or
“elders” (experienced
Neopagan clergy you respect), and perform a private or public
rite of elevation.
If you don’t feel that you’re already
at your desired level, but rather that you are ready to rise
to that level, then you’ll want an ordeal/testing (Type
Two) initiation, the central parts of which should be private.
If you want to have a close magical/spiritual
connection with an already existing tradition, then you’re
going to have to find representatives of that tradition who would
be willing to grant you that contact, in whatever sorts of rituals
are, well, traditional for that group.
For those seeking historical authenticity
as Druids, however, I should point out that there are no Neopagan
Druid groups that actually go back any further than 35 years
or so. The oldest of the currently existing Mesopagan
Druid orders, on the other hand, seems to have a more-or-less
“unbroken” line of initiations
that go back two or three centuries. They might
go back a bit further, as might some of the other Mesopagan Druid
groups, but none of them have ever released much in the way of
historical evidence.
The bottom line here is that, as far as
“authentic” Druid
traditions are concerned, none of the Mesopagan Druid organizations
are engaging in practices or promoting beliefs that we can prove
actually resemble those of the original Paleopagan Druids very
much; while the Neopagan Druid groups (at least the honest ones)
admit that they have reconstructed modern versions of
Paleopagan Druidism. So, just as with Wicca, the odds are that
anyone who tells you they can initiate you into an Authentic
Ancient Tradition™ is probably lying, was lied to by their
teachers, and/or perhap isn’t very bright.
I won’t deny that it’s possible
that some “family tradition Druids”
may have survived in the wilds of Wales or the
crags of Cornwall — after all, Druidism was a social caste
with membership handed down in families — and some of these
people may have joined a Masonic Druid order or two in the last
couple of centuries. But whatever authentic beliefs or practices
they might have brought to these orders is by now inextricably
mixed with the Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, Spiritualism
and “Celtic Christianity”
of these groups. At this stage it would be nearly
impossible to disentangle the authentic Paleopagan survivals
from the Judeo-Christian accretions.
I now insist that anyone declaring him/herself
to be a “family tradition Druid” recite some “traditional”
invocations in Old Irish, Old Welsh, or Gaulish — in proper
poetic form, of course — in front of a trained linguist.
Or that they recite the geneology of a local family of note going
back thirty generations. Or that they be able to describe, in
detail, the common law subtleties of boundry disputes between
claimants of equal vs. unequal rank. Or that they explain the
different procedures for sacrificing appropriate types of offerings
to specific deities, ancestors, and nature spirits. Funny how
none of them ever do…
The Role of the Clergy in an Initiation
The part to be played by a priest/ess, Heirophant,
Lodge Master, etc., in an initiation depends entirely upon which
approach or combination of approaches an individual or group
eventually decides to take. There’s also the practical question
of whether there happens to be an available clergyperson or other
appropriate ceremonial leader around at the time someone wants
to be initiated. But assuming that there is such a person in
the area when the time is right, exactly what should she or he
be doing during the ceremony?
In a Type One recognition ceremony, for example,
the initiation is essentially being done by the entire group.
In this situation, the clergyperson is “simply”
supervising the energy flow as he or she would
do in any other group ritual they were leading (the importance
of having competent leadership for group ceremonies is a whole
’nother kettle of fish).
A Type Two ordeal, however, requires that
a judgement be passed as to whether the candidate has successfully
achieved the level of growth sought. This judgement may be passed
by either (a) the initiatee and/or (b) the initiator and/or (c)
impartial witnesses.
Having the initiatee decide for her/himself
whether or not they have successfully accomplished the initiation’s
goals, is an option that is open to a great deal of abuse, especially
with younger or more inexperienced candidates. The second option
requires the initiator to be able to suspend her or his own personal
biases (pro or con) towards each initiatee, and can often ensnare
all parties concerned in sexual, economic, magical and/or political
quagmires.
The third option, using witnesses, is often
best, which is why initiatees are frequently expected to be able
to “publically” perform certain tasks in order to prove that they
have passed their tests. These proofs may be positive and/or
negative ones. For example, the candidate may be required to
show that she/he is alive, sane, received a key symbol in a vision,
has created a good song based on themes presented by the initiator,
and so forth. Or, conversely, he or she may be expected to have
not screamed, or broken concentration, or orgasmed, or failed
to orgasm, or fainted, or forgotten important phrases, etc.
It is absolutely critical to this option that
all the participants in the ritual are willing to accept the
results, regardless of whether they indicate success or failure.
This is very difficult to handle when working with friends, which
is why group agreement on standards and on what constitutes
“a passing grade” should
be arrived at long before any ceremony even begins. If that agreement
is sufficiently firm, all parties involved will feel much better
the next day. Especially since, if you know you are going to
have to pass certain tests in front of witnesses, you are far
more likely to put off your initiation until you are genuinely
ready — thus avoiding the all-too-common problems associated
with “quickie initiations.”
As for the Type Three transmission of an intact
tradition, this is something that will take us Neopagans many
years to accumulate. However, the use of traditional languages
and proper invocatory techniques will certainly help us (both
as initiators and as initiatees) to make the desired spiritual
and magical connections with our predecessors.
Some Further Questions
It has been pointed out that this analysis
of initiation is viewing the experience primarily from the point
of view of the individual initiatee. It might be useful to consider
initiation from the point of view of the initiator, the group
members, spectators, etc. What are their attitudes, expectations,
experiences? What sort of spiritual or magical transformation
takes place in these other people, or in the group as a whole?
(I know I’ve certainly been transformed by several
of the initiations I have performed for others.) What’s
the best way to counsel someone who has just failed an initiation?
All of these are good subjects for further discussion.
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