VARIOUS ERRORS CONCERNING INITIATION

In order to prepare the ground, we do not think it superfluous to recall here certain additional errors concerning the nature and aim of initiation, for everything we have had occasion to read on this subject over the years has brought almost daily proof of widespread misunderstanding. We cannot of course think of undertaking here a kind of ‘survey’ in which we would methodically examine every error in detail—a tedious and uninteresting exercise; better to confine ourselves to a consideration of certain ‘typical’ cases, which has the further advantage of sparing us from having to make direct references to particular authors or schools, for it should be understood that these remarks have an import altogether independent of any question of ‘personalities’—or rather, to speak more precisely, of individualities.

We would first of all remind the reader, without wishing to stress the point unduly, of the all too prevalent notion that initiation belongs to a merely ‘social’ or ‘moral’ order,^[1] which latter are much too limited and so to speak ‘terrestrial’, although, as we have often stated elsewhere, the crudest error is often not the most dangerous.

To cut short all confusion we will only say that such notions do not even apply to that preliminary aspect of initiation that antiquity designated by the expression ‘lesser mysteries’; as we shall explain further on, these do indeed concern the human individuality, but have to do with the integral development of its possibilities and therefore go beyond the corporeal modality through which activity is exercised in the domain common to all men. We can hardly see the value or even the justification of a so-called initiation limited to repeating what is most banal in profane knowledge — what is ‘within everyone’s reach’ — all the while disguising itself under a more or less enigmatic form. In saying this we do not deny that initiatic knowledge may have applications in the social order as well as in all other orders, but this is an altogether different question. First of all, such contingent applications in no way constitute the aim of initiation any more than the secondary traditional sciences constitute the essence of a tradition, and then they also have an intrinsic quality that sets them apart, for they are derived from principles having nothing to do with current precepts of ‘morality’, especially the celebrated ‘lay morality’ dear to many of our contemporaries; and in any case, the traditional applications proceed in ways that by the very nature of things cannot be comprehended by the profane and are therefore very far from what someone once called ‘the preoccupation with living properly’. He who restricts himself to ‘moralizing’ about symbols, no matter how laudable his intentions, will certainly not produce any work of initiation; but we will return to this later when we treat the initiatic teachings more directly.

Errors more subtle, and so the more to be feared, sometimes arise when a ‘communication’ with superior states or ‘spiritual worlds’ is mentioned in connection with initiation, for this involves the all too frequent illusion that something is ‘superior’ simply because it appears to be in some way extraordinary or ‘abnormal’. We will recall here what we have said elsewhere about the confusion of the psychic with the spiritual, which is the error most often committed in this regard,^[2] for the psychic states in fact have nothing ‘superior’ or ‘transcendent’ about them, but are merely a part of the individual human state;^[3] and when we speak of superior states of the being we mean, and without any abuse of language, exclusively the supra-individual states. Some worsen the confusion and make ‘spiritual’ almost synonymous with ‘invisible’ by indiscriminately taking as ‘spiritual’ all that is not accessible to the ordinary and ‘normal’ senses; in just this way for example we have seen the term ‘etheric’ applied to what is quite simply that part of the corporeal world of least density! In such a climate one greatly fears that the ‘communication’ in question will turn out to be nothing more than ‘clairvoyance’ or the exercise of some other psychic faculty of similar insignificance, even if it were genuine. This is what in fact always happens, for in the final analysis this is the orientation of all the modern Western pseudo-initiatic schools, some of which even expressly take as their aim ‘the development of the latent psychic powers in man’. We will return later to this question of alleged ‘psychic powers’ and the illusions to which they lend themselves.

Yet there is more to this, for we must admit that with some individuals there really is communication with the superior states; however, this is still far from being adequate to characterize initiation. In fact, such a communication is also established by rites, particularly religious rites, of a purely exoteric order; and we should not forget that in such a case spiritual influences, and not only psychic ones, do indeed play a role, although for ends quite different from those of the initiatic domain. All that is authentically traditional may be generally defined as the intervention of a ‘non-human’ element, but the presence of this common feature is not sufficient reason to permit of our failing to make the necessary distinctions, and in particular of conflating the religious and initiatic domains, or of seeing at most a simple difference of degree when there is really a difference of nature, and indeed of a profound nature. This confusion is especially frequent among those who claim to study initiation ‘from the outside’, moreover with intentions that can differ greatly; therefore it is necessary to denounce such confusion formally: esoterism is not the ‘interior’ aspect of a religion but is essentially something other than religion, even when its base and support are found therein, as happens in certain traditional forms, in Islam for example;^[4] and initiation is not some sort of special religion reserved for a minority, as those seem to imagine who speak of the ancient mysteries as ‘religious’.^[5] It is not feasible for us to develop here all the differences that separate the religious and initiatic domains, which task would certainly carry us even further afield than the mystical domain, itself only a part of the former. For our present purposes it must suffice to emphasize that religion considers the human being exclusively in his state of individuality and does not aim to bring him beyond it but rather to assure him of the most favorable conditions in this state,^[6] whereas the essential aim of initiation is to go beyond the possibilities of this state and to effect a passage to the superior states, and even finally to lead the being beyond every conditioned state of whatever kind.

Concerning initiation, it follows that mere communication with the superior states cannot be regarded as an end but only as a point of departure. If this communication must be established at the very start by the action of a spiritual influence, it is only to permit the prospective initiate effectively to take possession of these states and not simply, as in the order of religion, to have ‘grace’ descend upon him, a ‘grace’ that does link him to these states in a certain way but does not grant him entry to them. To express this in a manner perhaps more easily understood we can say that if, for example, someone can communicate with angels without thereby ceasing to be himself, that is to say remaining enclosed in the conditions of human individuality, he will not be any the more advanced from the initiatic point of view,^[7] for here it is not a matter of communicating with beings in an ‘angelic’ state but of realizing such a supra-individual state oneself; not of course as a human individual, which would obviously be absurd, but insofar as the being that manifests itself as a human individual in a certain state also contains the possibilities of all other states. All initiatic realization is therefore essentially and purely ‘interior’, just the opposite of that ‘going out of oneself’ that constitutes ‘ecstasy’ in the proper and etymological sense of the word;^[8] this is certainly not the only difference but it is at least one of the major differences between the mystical states, which belong entirely to the religious domain, and the initiatic states. It is indeed this point to which we must always return eventually, since the confusion of the initiatic with the mystical point of view—the insidious character of which we have emphasized from the outset—is capable of deceiving minds that would not be caught by the more crude deformations of modern pseudo-initiations and that might, without too much difficulty, come to understand what initiation really is, if they did not encounter these subtle errors along the way, errors seemingly put there expressly to deflect them from such an understanding.