Initiation and Identity Change

From Menletter March 2004

By Tim Baehr

Disclaimer: This essay expresses my opinions and personal experiences with initiation and identity change. Your opinions and experiences may be quite different.

Traditional Initiation

One of the hallmarks of male initiation in traditional cultures is a change in identity that follows some kind of test or ordeal. This sometimes involves a ritual wounding along with the assigning of a new and perhaps secret name.

In Western culture, naming rituals mostly have to do with religious rites surrounding birth. Name or identity changes for events later in life are rare. In traditional Western marriages, the wife adopts her new husband's family name, either abandoning her own or relegating it to a middle name. Adolescents in the Catholic Church adopt a "confirmation name," typically the name of a favorite saint. Other changes take place in gang initiations or in the criminal underworld, where an alias, moniker, or nickname may be ascribed to someone. Although these rites no longer have many aspects of ritual initiation (if they ever did), they do involve a community's witnessing of a change in life status.

Ritual wounding is rarer, except in the Jewish bris rite of circumcision. In certain Christian churches, it may consist merely of the light slap the bishop gives at confirmation. Wounding may also take place in the hazing of fraternity pledges or the initiation rites of street gangs.

Why Initiation?

Why should men care about initiation and the identity changes that take place with it? The vast majority of us in the West never even think about it. One reason we should care lies in the traditional role of initiation in admitting us to a community of men, a community that bears witness to our common struggles (and wounds) and provides elders to mentor us and help us along. By contrast, in modern society we're often in competition with our age peers, and the elders are simply our bosses. Most bosses, uninitiated themselves, have no sense of their duty to mentor us to the benefit of the community; they merely manage us as "human resources" on behalf of some anonymous corporate entity.

Although we may have loving families and an intimate partner who helps define who we are, many of us men live in dreary isolation from each other, suspicious of other men, never quite sure of ourselves. We may be more comfortable around women than around men. When we do find ourselves in the company of men, we often discover that our interactions are superficial and directionless, as if we were a bunch of over-age lost boys -- which, as uninitiated men, we still are. We're in many ways still adolescents, but we're now jaded by life.

Initiation in Western Culture

Modern Western culture has lost most of the trappings of initiation that mark changes in life status, especially the transition from boy to man. It's almost too easy to see the cause of this loss in the spread of Christian churches and their view of traditional cultures as pagan, and later in the Industrial Revolution's pulling of men out of their homes, off their farms, and into the factories. I suspect the reasons are deeper and more complex, but they're beyond the scope of this essay.

Whatever the cause, we're left without a tradition of initiation and with some dilemmas if we want to bring initiation into our work as men. What kind of initiation rituals can we devise? Can we adopt rituals from other cultures? Do we make up our own?

It seems to me that the traditional ritual initiation by elders would be very contrived and artificial in our culture. We're not Native Americans or Africans or indigenous peoples of South America or Australia. In my opinion, adopting a traditional initiation ritual wholesale, outside of its host culture, could easily devolve into mere play-acting and would dishonor the host culture.

Men who have become part of the so-called men's movement over the past couple of decades are in a community of men that could provide a cultural context for initiation. However, many men begin "men's work" in their thirties or forties, and a ritual ordeal would, I think, seem not only very contrived and artificial, but too far removed from the adolescent wonder and cockiness that can make traditional initiation work. Men beyond their twenties have perhaps seen too much of life already.

And that -- having "seen too much" -- may just be the key to adult male initiation in the West.

Life's Ordeals, Wounds, and Ritual

By the time most of us hit our late thirties, give or take ten years, we've experienced a lot of change brought about by life's tests and ordeals: illness, injury, violence, loss, divorce, unemployment, depression, defeat, and so on. We all respond differently to these ordeals, often in ways that present further ordeals: bitterness, anger, numbness, denial, addiction, neuroses, insomnia, overwork, thrill-seeking, or a combination of these and more. The wounds we get from these ordeals are physically and psychologically real, and sometimes intense, but they are not administered in a ritual setting.

Some men do manage to work things out, through therapy, the help of a spouse or friend, religious counseling, and so on. But even in these cases, the wounds may only be patched over so that the men can function in what passes for the real world.

One very useful thing can happen when a man gets involved in men's work: bringing past ordeals and wounds to the present and re-imagining them in the ritual, sacred space of a community of men. Metaphorically, we rip the scabs and patches off our wounds and expose them as witnesses to our ordeals. With the help of ritual, we recognize and celebrate life's ordeals in ourselves and others, and the role of these ordeals in forming our identities. The ritual becomes woven into the past ordeals as a way of honoring their wounds and bringing them into the adult male community. In the ritual context, we use the wounds as elements of initiation, a birth into new identities. The hurt, unformed boy ritually dies, and the man emerges.

This is not healing, in the sense that a wound is cured and disappears. The wounds remain, but they are stripped of their shame and given an honorable place in the community. The community of men is crucial to this process. Sometimes witnessing and honoring of the wounds from another man's ordeal is just as important as sharing our own.

Ritual involves change and transformation. The ritual itself can take several forms. Sometimes it's done through drumming and poetry, sometimes through myth and story-telling, sometimes through a council of sharing after a vision quest, sometimes through active imaginative techniques like breathwork, a sweat lodge, or deep rage work. Men who've never done these things may find them strange and even threatening. A certain amount of discomfort about the unknown is helpful; the discomfort is often a signal that something important is about to happen.

Sacred Spaces, Safety, and Community

Ritual work has to be undertaken with great care. Physical and psychological safety is extremely important. Knowledgeable leaders or facilitators take pains to create a sacred space, a safe container, for the ritual work, just as the elders in traditional societies have done for millennia.

Sacred spaces, in my experience, are a combination of the physical setting and the trusting community within that setting. Physical setting is quite important; I doubt much useful work could be done in a hotel ballroom or a school gymnasium or a church-basement recreation hall. These are too close to our ordinary environment. An important factor is access to nature -- woods, desert, seashore, lakes, and so on. This may be because we have in our genetic makeup a deep memory for natural settings: Until fairly recently in human existence, most people spent the majority of their time outdoors.

As for community, I've seen skilled leaders use group activities to build a community of trust among 25 men within a couple of days. To an outsider, the activities could look like standard summer camp stuff -- blindfold walks, mask-making and such. The main thing seems to be that these activities involve men actively engaging with each other, not just sitting around talking about feelings. The trusting community provides a container for any ritual activities that are to take place. When this container is carefully built, men can be confident that nothing will get out of hand physically or emotionally, and that whatever happens will stay within the community.

Getting Started

So -- how can a man get initiated through men's work? I think two ingredients are necessary.

First, and perhaps a bit obviously, is finding a men's gathering at which to do the work. I would prefer one that is out in nature somewhere and led by wise and experienced facilitators. A minimum of a long weekend, say, Friday night to late Sunday afternoon, gives the group a chance to create sacred space and participate in ritual. A week is even better.

Check out the Events page and the article on the Men's Wisdom Council, both on this site.

Second is working on intentions. This doesn't necessarily mean arriving at a gathering with a specific agenda based on an assessment of our needs and what we'd like to change, though I guess this is possible. The most useful intention may simply be openness to listen, watch, think, and feel. It takes some courage to travel into unknown territory, but it's also exciting to be an explorer.

Even if there is no specific ritual labeled "initiation," a men's gathering, led wisely and entered into with intention, can be an initiatory experience. Some men find themselves profoundly changed by their first gathering; others find the effect more cumulative after several gatherings. But quickly or slowly, the change in identity becomes very real.

A New Identity

It's reasonable to ask, "What about this change in identity? Will people still know me, or want to know me? Will I be a stranger to myself?"

Re-entry from any intense experience can be awkward. If you went to college, you may remember what a know-it-all pain in the ass you were after your first year, or even your first semester. Going away and getting your brain fried -- uh, filled -- by new experiences had really changed you. You may have even felt that your identity was changing, and you may have been both excited and disturbed by the changes. But basically, you were the same person, and things settled down after a while. Your identity was changing, for sure, but the changes had somehow been integrated with your old self.

I have to admit I was a bit weird when I started doing men's work many years ago, without even thinking about ritual and initiation. Things settled down pretty quickly, however. I didn't lose my job or marriage or anything like that. In fact, things settled down so thoroughly that I stopped being active in men's work.

I began more intensive men's work about six years ago, with a more conscious emphasis on initiation. And I found that the work was actually strengthening my career, marriage, and relationships in general -- particularly my relationship with myself. I have a strong feeling of community with other men and a sense that I'm part of an on-going initiation and renewal of identity -- from boy to man and from man to elder as I get beyond my sixtieth birthday.

My advice to any man seeking initiation through men's work is to be gentle to himself and the people around him as he re-enters his "ordinary" world. A first gathering or retreat can seem like a cataclysmic, life-changing event, but it's usually only just a beginning. I'd let the experience bubble under the surface for a while; the good stuff should rise to the top eventually. And I'd count on there being further gatherings or retreats, with deeper insights into the changes taking place.

(One way to dissipate the energy from a retreat, by the way, is to talk about it. But clamming up can sometimes be off-putting or even threatening to others, especially if we allow an aura of mystery and secrecy to creep in. When friends or family ask what happened, I've found that there are always interesting anecdotes about the activities or the people, which can be kept fairly superficial and not violate any confidences but that will satisfy people's curiosity: "I made this mask. It took a day for the plaster to dry, and then I had a lot of fun mixing the paints for it." "We had a blindfold trust walk. It was scary at first, but it turned out to be fun, and I learned to trust my partner." "I met a guy named Pete who had a wicked sense of humor. We really hit it off." An honest answer to questions about personal growth could be something like "Oh, I don't really know yet. These things take time." However much we may be sizzling with new-found insights, this answer could be more accurate than we imagine.)

Patience

If we don't feel we've experienced changes, much less an initiation, from a men's gathering, we might wait a while before we discount such gatherings entirely. As I implied above, things can sneak up on us over time. Several months after a retreat or gathering, a man may surprise himself, noticing that he's less anxious, less angry, more energetic, more self-assured, with a better sense of who he is. There's no guarantee, of course, and the changes may be subtle. Over time, a new identity may emerge.

At first, the biggest change we may experience is a desire to continue the work. One aspect of initiation is that it's initiation into something, into a community. Our society encourages men to work on things in isolation, to deal with our own problems, challenges, ordeals, and defeats, and to win at the expense of others. With a community of men, we realize that we're not alone in our sorrows, grief, struggles, and defeats -- and also not alone in our joys and victories.

We begin to look forward to the next opportunity to join or re-create this community, and the community of all men everywhere.