Yes, in part. The old rites cannot simply be copied, because they belonged to whole cultures in which children grew up surrounded by real Adults, but the heart of what they did can be found again. In Therapeutic Shamanism that heart is finding your Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul, which is itself an initiation into Adulthood, and it is done as a gradual, grounded process, not as an ordeal: a modern rite is safe when it is prepared for, held by people who know what they are doing, suited to the person’s mental health, and leads somewhere, back into ordinary life.
Can initiation be recreated today? #
The need for it can be met, even if the old forms cannot be lifted out of their cultures. Finding your Soul is an initiation into Adulthood, and in Therapeutic Shamanism it is done through shamanic journeying to the Lower-World, the only place our Soul is to be found.1 Meeting the Soul and beginning to grow into it is an initiation, and like any true initiation it needs preparation first; it means facing things that most people do not want to face, and it is “not going to be light and fluffy”.2 See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?
Outside the shamanic world, people have also tried to rebuild rites of passage for young people. The youth workers and psychologists David Blumenkrantz and Marc Goldstein argue that when a community offers no meaningful rites, young people make their own from what is to hand, and that binge drinking, drug use and similar behaviour have become rites of passage reflecting adult status. Their answer is to rebuild the rite deliberately, in the young person’s own community.3
Why can’t we simply copy the old rites? #
Because the rite was only one part of a whole way of life. In hunter-gatherer tribes children were raised by real Adults who modelled and embodied Adulthood, so when the time came, adolescents knew exactly what they needed to step into. Most people today do not know what an Adult is, and confuse it with getting a job, settling down and having a mortgage.4 A ceremony on its own cannot supply what a whole tribe of Adults used to supply.
Most of the rites that survive also come from farming peoples, and virtually all existing shamanic societies are agricultural, so even where they are still animist they are to some degree affected by domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and Taker thinking; they are not a clean template either.5 See How did traditional peoples initiate young people into adulthood?
Does a rite of passage have to be dramatic or traumatic? #
No. It is often said in the shamanic community that people come to shamanism, or to their Soul, through near-death experiences or other traumatic events. That is sometimes true, because such experiences can be the death of an old way of being. But there are other paths, gentler and steadier ones, which are equally effective.6
Paul Francis’s own path to his Soul ran through a breakdown and severe post-traumatic stress, and having been through it he does not recommend that way at all, nor would he choose it again. That is why, as both a shamanic practitioner and a psychotherapist, he teaches shamanism in a way that is effective and manageable, “grounded and trauma-free”, avoiding unnecessary drama.6 See What is shamanic initiation, and what part does dismemberment play?
What makes a modern rite of passage safe? #
Several things. The youth workers Blumenkrantz and Goldstein, coming from a quite different starting point, stress some of the same ones.
The first is readiness. Becoming an Adult is a process, not an event, and it takes time; but a person needs to be ready to begin it, and starting before they are is setting themselves up to fail. So the preparation comes first.7
The second is mental health. Journeying for yourself can help a lot with things like depression, anxiety, addictions and low self-esteem, if you still have a reasonably good grip on ordinary reality. But for anyone prone to psychotic episodes, moderate to severe dissociation, unstable and unmanaged manic depression, or anything else that makes it hard to keep hold of everyday reality, journeying for yourself could make things worse, and shamanic help is better given by an experienced practitioner who understands mental health.8 Being firmly rooted in ordinary reality, and able to come back at will, is an essential condition. See Is shamanic work safe if I have a mental health condition?
The third is who holds it. In Blumenkrantz and Goldstein’s words, “you can only bring someone as far as you have been yourself”, so those who initiate others need to have been through their own initiation.9 Psychotherapy and shamanism each have something to give here, and neither is a good substitute for the other.10
The fourth is that the rite has an end. The South African youth worker Quentin Fredericks, who spent his teenage years in gangs in Soweto and now takes young people into the bush, told the writer Jay Griffiths that gang rituals are warped initiations with no ending, which go on until death; a ritual should mark “a beginning, middle and end”, and you come back from the bush.11
What can go wrong? #
A rite that keeps the ordeal and loses the holding can do real harm. The sociologist Jay Johnson’s study of sport hazing found that rituals defended as bonding a team in fact fractured relationships on it, though new players still wanted some ritual to mark their joining.12 The anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse found that shared, frightening ordeals can fuse people to a group so strongly that they become readier to fight and die for it, a bond armed groups have long used.13 Neither of these is an argument against initiation; they are a picture of what happens when the form survives without the EldersElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this, the purpose and the return. See What is communitas?
Is there evidence that modern rites of passage work? #
Not much of the kind researchers usually ask for, and the people who run them answer that in two ways. Blumenkrantz and Goldstein list twenty elements they hold to make a modern rite work, among them silence, time alone, connection with nature and with ancestral roots, non-ordinary states, giving away something of the old self, service to the community and public celebration, and they say their own programme has reached an estimated 100,000 young people over thirty years. They also say that such programmes lie outside the usual evidence-based model, and their article reports no outcome figures; the first author also owns the trademark of the programme it describes.14
Their reply is that a rite of passage has to grow out of a particular community’s values and relationships, so it can be guided by principles but not packaged as a set of activities that would work the same anywhere.14 Wilderness approaches such as the vision quest have their own literature; see Who is Bill Plotkin, and what is soul initiation?
