An Introduction to The Bones of Initiation
Understanding and tending the initiatory process is, without a doubt, the most urgent concern facing humankind today. Indeed, the alternative—unconscious eruptions of fundamentalist and fanatic social drama—presents the greatest danger to life on earth. The most terrible suffering is the suffering of meaningless wounds. The modern lack of intentional initiation (rites of passage) subjects humanity to individual and collective crises that seem to have no connection to a meaningful life. When we are given the merely "rational" answers as to why hardship befalls us the resulting lack of meaning has one devastating consequence: "resentment." Unconscious resentment is the primary business of modern civilization: fomenting industries, social movements, and pop-psychologies based in "substitute satisfactions"—e.g., consumerism, addiction, fanaticism—satisfactions, or "answers" that are decidedly puerile and ultimately one-sided. Initiation, on the contrary, intends the arduous crossing of a maturation threshold—a generative crisis which cultivates the adult capacity to sustain and endure paradox. In The Sibling Society Robert Bly describes the devastating effects of life in a culture that refuses initiated adult authority: "Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents—seeing that—have no desire to become adults." We abdicate our own interior authority in favor of earning approval. Approval is a substitute satisfaction for the natural desire to receive confirmation in and of the soul. Initiation carries the individual into the realm of myth; where the stories are much too big to be taken personally or literally. Here we are enabled to reframe and revise our one-sided stories and infuse them with multiple and deeply rooted meanings. The recognition that establishing guided rites of passage is vital for a healthy society precipitates a growing need. Although there are successful efforts being made, there are many more attempts undertaken without a grounded understanding. In order to address this need Daniel Deardorff and Martin Shaw, with the Mythsinger Foundation, are working to delineate the essential stages, structures, and dynamics—the very "bones"—of the initiatory process.
Martin Shaw is a storyteller, mythologist and Wilderness Rites of Passage teacher. In the UK, where he lives, Shaw leads an award winning program, entitled Stalking the Rebel Soul, which entails a year long study of old story, wild places, and poetic imagination. For a decade Shaw has been leading individuals and groups, from at risk youth to corporate directors, through the initiatory process. Shaw is the Author of A Branch From the Lightning Tree: Wilderness. Myth, and the Life Not Yet Lived—an in depth study of the relationship between culture, ritual, and wilderness.
Daniel Deardorff is a "Singer" in the old sense of that word, which involves being a musician, a storyteller, and a maker of ritual. He has been a composer and a performing artist for more than three decades. As an independent scholar of myth Deardorff's emphasis is on mythopoesis [mythmaking] and the performative aspects of mythic expression. He is the author of The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, & Psyche.
