Mircea Eliade – Mystery and Spiritual Regeneration: The Initiatic Meaning of Suffering
5. The Initiatic Meaning of Suffering
What can be the meaning of such tortures? The first European observers
spoke of the innate cruelty of the natives. But this is not the explanation.
The natives are no more cruel than civilized men. But for all traditional
societies, suffering has a ritual value; the torture is held to be administered
by superhuman beings, its aim being the spiritual transmutation of the
victim. And the torture is also an expression of initiatic death.
To be tortured signifies to be cut in pieces by the demon masters of initiation, or, in other words, be put to death by dismemberment.
We remember how St. Anthony was tortured by the demons: he was lifted into the air, smothered under the earth; the demons cut his flesh, dislocated his limbs, cut him in pieces.
The Christian tradition calls these tortures “the temptation of St. Anthony”—and this is true to the extent that temptation is identified
with initiatic trial.
By victoriously withstanding all these trials, that is, by resisting all “temptations,” the monk Anthony became a saint.
This means that he “killed” the profane man that he was and was resuscitated as another, a regenerated man, a saint.
But in a non-Christian perspective, this also means that the demons have succeeded in their task, which was precisely to “kill” the profane man, thus enabling him to be regenerated.
By identifying the forces of evil with the demons, Christianity divested the
demons of all positive function in the economy of salvation.
But before Christianity the demons were, among other things, the masters of initiation.
They seized the neophytes, tortured them, subjected them to a great number of trials, and finally killed them in order that they might be reborn with a regenerated body and soul.
It is significant that they play the same initiatic role in the temptation of St. Anthony: for in the last analysis, it is their tortures and their “temptations” that enabled Anthony to accede to sainthood.
These considerations have not carried us away from our subject.
We have wished to stress the fact that the initiatic tortures of the Mandan were not inspired by any innate cruelty of the American Indians but had a ritual significance, dismemberment by initiating demons.
This religious evaluation of physical suffering is confirmed by other facts: certain grave diseases, particularly of a psychic nature, are regarded by the primitives as a “demoniacal possession,” in the sense that the sufferer has been elected by the divine beings to become a shaman, a mystic, and that in consequence he is being initiated—that is, tortured, dismembered, and killed by the “demons.”
We have elsewhere noted numerous examples of such initiatic disorders
among future shamans.29 We must therefore conclude that sufferings both
physical and psychic are identified with the tortures necessary to any initiation.
Disease was interpreted among the primitives as the consequence of
a supernatural election; hence it was regarded as an initiatic trial.
It was necessary to “die” to something in order to be reborn, that is, to be cured: one died to what one was before, to the profane condition; he who recovered was another, a man newborn, in our case a shaman, a mystic.
On different levels and in varying contexts, we shall encounter the same
initiatic pattern, comprising trials, tortures, ritual death, and symbolic
resurrection.
We have observed this scenario of spiritual regeneration both in the so-called initiations of puberty (which are obligatory for all the members of the clan) and in those of the men’s secret societies, which constitute a more closed circle within the clan.
But we also find that individual mystical callings, as well as the initiatic diseases of future shamans, follow the same scenario: sufferings, tortures, death, and resurrection.
And this 29 Eliade, Shamanism, pp. 33ft.
leads us to conclude that the mystery of spiritual regeneration involves an
archetypal process that is enacted on different levels and in numerous contexts whenever a man must transcend one mode of being to arrive at another, higher one, or, more precisely, whenever there is a question of spiritual transmutation.
This perfect homogeneity and continuity between the mystery of the
initiations of puberty, the rituals of the secret societies, and the intimate
experiences that among the primitives determine the mystical calling
strikes us as highly significant; we shall have more to say of it. ~Mircea Eliade, Man and Transformation, Page 17-19
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