Organizing data from cultures the world over, Mircea Eliade, one of
the preeminent interpreters of world religion in the twentieth century,
lays out the basic patterns of initiation: group puberty rites, entrance
into secret cults, shamanic instruction, individual visions, and heroic
rites of passage. The vast information assembled here transcends
usual scholarship. Eliade always affirms the greater experience in all
initiation – the indissoluble tie between humans and the cosmos of
gods, spirits, animals, ancestors, and nature.
As Michael Meade writes in his foreword, Eliade “fervently worked
at keeping the doors of perception open to the world of sacred symbols
and creative ritual. Through his insistence that we are each the
necessary inheritors of a vast sacred heritage, he has acted as a spiritual
elder and distant mentor to me and many students of myth and
ritual. Like an archeologist of symbols, he has unearthed, preserved,
and found new meanings in the rites of our ancestors.”