The Archetype of Initiation

Book excerpt: This book urges contemporary healers to utilize premodern tribal principles of sacred space and ritual process long considered lost or inaccessible to modern culture. Properly prepared "ritual elders" can guide people through ritual steps from (a) the challenge of a life-crisis, into (b) sacred space and time for needed reorganization, and then into (c) a newly transformed personal and social world. These steps derive from key concepts in the scholarship of Arnold van Gennep, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and Victor Turner, reformulated with new insights from extensive field research and psychoanalytic practice. "Here Robert Moore's deeply penetrating mind awakens us to the urgency of what time it is' time to reclaim the sense of sacred space in our secularized culture, time to grow a mature ritual leadership that can hold and steward that space, time to restore the processes of a comprehensive initiation into wholeness which alone can re-create a habitable world for humanity." Don Jones, Past International Chairman, The ManKind Project "These materials articulate my conviction that our species has evolved to the point where we either must continue to provide conscious, creative, and responsible rituals of life that serve the maturation and healing of all its people, or face the alternative of unconscious and destructive participation in rituals of personal, social, and global death." Author's Preface