INITIATION
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 3
Fall 1976
Initiation only arrives at a beginning through an ending that makes new growth possible. What in the non-initiatic sense seem to be two sides of a contradiction are linked stages of a whole process: dissolution and death must precede a new birth. Inanna must lose her jewels and her robe; a discipleship as it intensifies is stripped of words and symbols. Over and over, the iniation rites show us loss, sacrifice, suffering, and death as the road leading to the door into a transformed life. The moment of revelation, the new birth, has to be won; there is a whole process of training, an education and a discipline, that must prepare the candidate for that testing.
As the process must begin long before the great moment of revelation and change, so it must continue afterward; it is the beginning of something; the new birth is for a new experience of living. And the next stage again is full of difficulty and trial, and perhaps eventual triumph; it leads to another ending, and so on like the ouroborus, the snake that swallows its own tail in an infinite circle--a continual going forth and a continual returning. --from the editorial Focus
ARTICLES
DISENCHANTMENT Sam D. Gill
How, in the shock of initiation, the death of the gods of naive faith can bring to birth a new level of relation to the sacred.
OFF-SEASON Janwillem van de Wetering
A new story, the first in an American periodical, by the author of The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery.
EAGLES FLY OVER Arthur Amiotte
A moving account of the Lakota artist's initial experiences under the guidance of the shaman Petaga.
TOWARDS INITIATION Evelyn Eaton
A woman who has been drawn into the Paiute way of life and admitted to the inner circles of their ceremonial traditions explores the primordial meaning of initiation
FROM STONE TO A NEW HEAVEN Fernando Llosa Porras
A fresh interpretation of the symbolism of an ancient Peruvian cultic center by a scholar who has probed its meaning in years of study.
SACRED TRADITION AND MODERN MAN: A Conversation with Mircea Eliade
In a rare interview, the permier contemporary historian of religions discusses the import of myth and religion.
ANGELUS SILESIUS: WESTERN ZEN POET Frederick Franck
The simple rhymes of a seventeenth-century European mystic, as echoed in the sayings of Oriental masters, express a view of human nature that bridges East and West.
TANGENTS: Books in Review
EQUUS AND THE DEATH OF PSYCHIATRY
John A. Miles, Jr. On Schaffer's recent play.
DEATH AND EVIL: BECKER'S BRILLIANT
Eugene Bianchi on the work of Ernest Becker.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE TREASURE
P.L. Travers on Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment.
EPICYCLES: Traditional Stories from around the World
THE RETURN: I AND II Christian and Navajo
THE SEVEN GATES OF THE BREAT BELOW Sumerian
TWO PAIRS OF SHOES Islamic
TALES OF A DEMON: THE THREE BRAHMAN SUITORS Indian
