10

Initiation and Consecration

Having defined the essence of both the pinnacle and center of a traditional civilization, it is necessary to describe briefly some of its external features that refer to already conditioned existential situations. This will enable me to indicate the origin of the first alteration of the world of Tradition.

The regal idea occurs in an already weakened form when it no longer becomes incarnated in beings who are naturally above human limitations, but rather in beings who must develop this quality within themselves. In the ancient Hellenic tradition, such a distinction corresponded analogically to that between a “god” (Olympian ideal) and a “hero.” In terms of the Roman tradition this distinction was formally sanctioned through the titles of deus and divus, the latter always designating a man who had become a god, the former designating a being who had always been a god. According to tradition, in Egypt the regal race of the θέοι was replaced by that of the ἡμίθεοι (who correspond to the “heroes”), who in turn precede in time the race of the νέκυες, an expression subject to being referred mainly to human leaders. What emerges in this context is a situation in which there is a certain distance between the person and the function being exercised: in order for a person to embody a certain function what is required is a specific action capable of producing in him a new quality; this action may appear either in the form of an initiation or of an investiture (or consecration). In the first case this action has a relatively autonomous and direct character; in the second case it is mediated, or it takes place from the outside through a priestly caste distinct from the regal caste.

As far as the regal initiation is concerned, it will suffice to repeat what has been said about the ritual, sacrificial, and triumphal actions that reenact those deeds attributed to a god or a hero with the intent of actualizing, evoking, or renewing the corresponding supernatural influences. This occurred in a very specific way in ancient Egypt. As I have said, the king at his enthronement reenacted the “sacrifice” that made Osiris a transcendent divinity; this rite was used not only as a way to renew the quality of a nature that was already divine by birth, but also and foremost as an initiation aimed at arousing the dimension of transcendence in the man who was destined to be king and at granting him “the gift of life.” As far as the. details of similar rites are concerned, I will limit myself to describing the rite that in the Eleusinian Mysteries corresponded to the bestowal of the regal title.^[1]

The future “king” first spends some time in solitary confinement. Then he must swim across a river through blood and vortices—in other words, he crosses the “stream of generation” by means of his own strength, leaving behind on the riverbank his old body, soul, and personality. The river is later crossed again by boat,^[2] and the king wears animal skins. These skins apparently signified totemic powers that emerged as a consequence of the suspension of the ephemeral, external I, powers that also represented the powers of the community; this symbolism was meant to establish a contact and an identification with the supernatural dimension. In the Bacchic ritual, after devouring the victims the Corybantes wore their skins; this was meant as an identification with the god represented by the sacrificial victims and as the act of taking on his strength and nature; the Egyptian initiate too wore the skin of a victim representing Set. Thus, the overall symbolism of the new phase of the ritual probably refers to the achievement of a state in which one can undertake the symbolic crossing, thanks to which he will be qualified to become the leader, even after assuming certain powers related to the subterranean and vital dimension of the collective organism.

The future “king” eventually reaches the other bank of the river and now must climb to the top of a mountain. Darkness surrounds him, but the gods help him to climb the path and to rise several levels. We notice here a recurrence of well-known symbols: the dry land or island, the mountain or the height. Moreover, we find the idea of planetary influences (the “rings” may correspond to the Platonic seven “wheels of destiny”) that one must overcome by climbing all the way to the symbolic region of the fixed stars, which represent the states of the pure world of being. This corresponds to the passage from the Lesser to the Greater Mysteries and to the old distinction between the lunar and telluric rite and the solar and Olympian rite. The person who is to be initiated is welcomed by other kings and by the highest dignitaries; he walks into an illuminated temple in order to establish contact with the divine; he is reminded to fulfill the main duties of a king; he finally receives the robes and the insignia of his dignity and sits on the throne.

In Egypt, the rite of regal initiation included three separate moments corresponding to the abovementioned phases; first came a purification; then the rite of the reception of the supernatural fluid symbolized by the crown (uraeus) or by the double crown (the crown was often called the “great sorceress,” who “establishes at the right and at the left hand of the king the gods of eternity and of stability”); and finally, the “ascent” to the temple representing the “otherworld” (paduat) and the “embrace” of the solar god, which was the definitive consecration that sanctified this new immortalizing birth and his divine nature and by virtue of which the Egyptian king appeared as the “son” of the same god.

The Eleusinian rite is one of the most complete rites of “regal” initiation; allegedly each of the symbols employed therein corresponded to a particular inner experience. Though at this time I do not intend to describe the means through which similar experiences were induced or what they were all about,^[3] I wish to emphasize that in the world of Tradition, initiation in its highest forms was conceived as an intensely real operation that was capable of changing the ontological status of the individual and of grafting onto him certain forces of the world of Being, or of the overworld. The title of rex (in Greek, βαστλέυς) at Eleusis testified to the acquired supernatural dimension that potentially qualified the function of the leader. The fact that at the time of the Eleusinian Mysteries this title certainly did not go together with effective political authority was due to the decadence of ancient Hellas. Because of this decadence, the ancient regal dignity was retained on a different plane than that of royal power, which by then had fallen into profane hands.^[4] This did not prevent temporal sovereigns in ancient times, however, from aspiring to achieve the dignity of an initiatory king, which was very different from the dignity that they actually enjoyed. Thus, for instance, when Hadrian and Antoninus were already Roman emperors, they received the title of “king” only after being initiated at Eleusis. According to concordant testimonies, the quality bestowed by initiation is distinct from and unrelated to any human merit: all of the human virtues combined could not produce this quality, just as, to a certain extent, no human “sin” could affect it.^[5] An echo of this notion was preserved in the Catholic view according to which the priestly dignity, which is transmitted sacramentally, cannot be effaced by any moral sin committed by the person endowed with it, since it remains in that person as an indoles indelebilis, an “indelible mark” (“You are a priest forever,” Ps. 110:4). Moreover, as in the case of the Mazdean notion of “glory” and of the Chinese notion of “virtue,” the priestly dignity corresponded to an objective power. In ancient China a distinction was made between those who were naturally endowed with “knowledge” and “virtue” (those who are capable of “fulfilling Heaven’s law with calm and imperturbability and no help from the outside” are at the pinnacle, and are “perfected” and “transcendent” men) and those who achieved them “by disciplining themselves and by returning to the rites.”^[6] The discipline (sieu-ki) that is suitable to the latter men and that is the equivalent of initiation was considered only as a means to the real creation of that “superior man” (kiun-tze) who could legitimately assume the function proper to the supreme hierarchical apex by virtue of the mysterious and real power inherent in him. The distinctive feature of what makes one a king is more evident when a consecration rather than an initiation occurs; for instance, only the characteristic special investiture that turns the already crowned Teutonic prince into the romanorum rex can bestow upon him the authority and the title of leader of the Holy Roman Empire. Plato wrote: “In Egypt no king is allowed to rule without belonging to the priestly class; if by any chance a king of another race rises to power through violence, he eventually needs to be initiated into this class.”^[7]

Likewise, Plutarch wrote that “A king chosen from among the warriors instantly became a priest and shared in the philosophy that is hidden for the most part in myths and stories that show dim reflections and insights of the truth.”^[8] The same was true for the Parsis; it was precisely because the Persian Great Kings were elevated to the dignity of “magi” at the time of their enthronement and thus reunited the two powers that Iran did not experience conflicts or antagonisms between royalty and priesthood during the better period of its tradition. At the same time it must be noted that traditionally, while those who had received the initiation were kings, the opposite was also true, namely, the fact that often the initiation and the priestly function itself were considered a prerogative of kings and of aristocratic castes. For instance, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (verse 270 ff.), the goddess allegedly restricted to the four Eleusinian princes and to their descendants the “celebration of the cult and the knowledge of sacred orgies,” by virtue of which “at death one does not incur the same fate as others.” Ancient Rome struggled for a long time against the plebeian prevarication, and insisted that the priests of the higher collegia and especially the. consuls (who originally enjoyed a sacred character themselves) were to be chosen only from patrician families. In this context, the need for a unitary authority was affirmed together with the instinctive acknowledgment that such an authority has a stronger foundation in those cases in which the race of the blood and the race of the spirit converge.

Let us now examine the case of kings who have not been raised to a superindividual dignity through initiation but rather through an investiture or a consecration that is mediated by a priestly caste; this form is typical of more recent, historical times. The primordial theocracies did not derive their authority from a church or from a priestly caste. The Nordic kings were kings immediately by virtue of their divine origin, and just like the kings of the Doric-Achaean period, they were the only celebrants of sacrificial actions. In China the emperor received his mandate directly “from heaven.” Until recently in Japan, the ritual of enthronement took place in the context of the individual spiritual experience of the emperor, who established contact with the influences of the regal tradition without the presence of an officiating clergy. Even in Greece and in Rome the priestly collegia did not “make” kings through their rites, but limited themselves to exercising the divinatory science in order to ascertain whether the person appointed to exercise the regal function “was found pleasing to the gods”; in other words, it was an issue of acknowledgment and not of investiture, as in the ancient Scottish tradition concerning the so-called Stone of Destiny. Conversely, at the origins of Rome the priesthood was conceived as some kind of emanation of the primitive regality and the king himself promulgated the laws regulating the cult. After Romulus, who was himself initiated to the divinatory art, Numa delegated the typically priestly functions to the collegium of the flamines, which he himself instituted;^[9] at the time of the empire, the priestly body was again subjected to the authority of the Caesars, just like the Christian clergy later became subjected to the Byzantine emperor. In Egypt, until the Twenty-first Dynasty, the king delegated a priest (designated as “the king’s priest,” nutir hon) to perform the rites only sporadically, and the spiritual authority itself always represented a reflection of the royal authority. The paleo-Egyptian nutir hon parallels the role often played in India by the purohita, who was a brāhmaṇa employed at court and in charge of performing fire sacrifices. The Germanic races ignored consecration up to the Carolingian era; Charlemagne crowned himself, and so did Ludovicus and Pius, who later crowned his own son, Lothar, without any direct involvement on the part of the pope. The same holds true for the earlier forms of all traditional civilization, including the historical cycles of pre-Colombian America, and especially for the Peruvian dynasty of the “solar masters” or Incas.

On the contrary, when a priestly caste or a church claims to be the exclusive holder of that sacred force that alone can empower the king to exercise his function, this marks the beginning of an involutive process. A spirituality that in and of itself is not regal, and conversely, a regality that is not spiritual, eventually emerged; this spirituality and this regality enjoyed separate existences. Also, a “feminine” spirituality and a material virility began to coexist jointly with a lunar “sacredness” and a material “solarity.” The original synthesis, which corresponded to the primordial regal attribute of the “glory” or of the celestial “fire” of the “conquerors,” was dissolved and the plane of absolute centrality was lost. We shall see later on that such a split marks the beginning of the descent of civilizations in the direction that has led to the genesis of the modern world.

Once the fracture occurred, the priestly caste portrayed itself as the caste in charge of attracting and transmitting spiritual influences, but without being capable of constituting their dominating center within the temporal order. This dominating center, instead, was virtually present in the quality of a warrior or a nobleman of the king to whom the rite of consecration communicated these influences (the “Holy Spirit” in the Catholic tradition) so that he may assume them and actualize them in an efficient form. Thus, in more recent times it is only through this priestly mediation and through a rite’s virtus deificans that the synthesis of the regal and priestly dimensions is reconstituted, a synthesis that is supposed to be the supreme hierarchical peak of a traditional social order. It is only in this way that the king again can be something more than a mere mortal.

Likewise, in the Catholic ritual the dress a king was supposed to wear before the rite of the investiture was simply a “military” dress; it is only in later times that a king began to wear the “regal dress” during the ceremony and began the tradition of sitting on an “elevated place” that had been reserved for him in the church. The rigorously symbolical meaning of the various phases of the ceremony has been preserved almost up to modern times. It is significant to find in older times the recurrent use of the expression “regal religion,” for which the enigmatic figure of Melchizedek was often evoked; already in the Merovingian era in reference to the king we find the formula: “Melchizedek noster, merito rex atque sacerdos. ” The king, who during the rite took off the dress that he previously put on, was believed to be one who “leaves the mundane state in order to assume the state of regal religion.” In A.D. 769 Pope Stephanus III reminded the Carolingians that they were a sacred race and a royal priesthood: “Vos gens sancta estis, atque regales estis sacerdotium.” Regal consecration was bestowed through anointing; back in those times this rite differed from the rite of consecration of bishops only in a few minor details, and therefore the king became as holy as a priest before men and God. Anointing, which belonged to the Jewish tradition and which was eventually taken up again by Catholicism, was the habitual rite employed to transfer a being from a profane into a sacred world;^[10] according to the Ghibelline ideal it was thanks to his virtue that the consecrated person became a deus-homo, in spiritu et viitute Christus domini, in una eminentia divinificationis—summus et instructor sanctae ecclesiae. Therefore it was said that “the king must stand out from the mass of lay people, since he participates in the priestly function by his having been anointed by consecrated oil.” The anonymous author of York wrote: “The king, the Christ [anointed] of the Lord, cannot be regarded as being a layman.” In the sporadic emergence of the idea that the rite of regal consecration has the power to erase every sin committed, including those that involved the shedding of blood, we find an echo of the abovementioned initiatory doctrine concerning the transcendence of the supernatural quality vis-à-vis any human virtue or sin.

In this chapter I have discussed initiation in relation to the positive function of regality, even when considered in material terms. I have also mentioned instances in which the initiatory dignity separated itself from that function, or better, instances in which that function separated itself from the initiatory dignity by becoming secularized and by taking on a merely warrior or political character. Initiation must also be considered, however, as an independent category of the world of Tradition without a necessary relation to the exercise of a visible function at the center of a society. Initiation (high-level initiation, not to be confused with initiation that is related to the regimen of the castes or to the traditional professions and the various artisan guilds) has defined, in and of itself, the action that determines an ontological transformation of man. High-level initiation has generated initiatory chains that were often invisible and subterranean and that preserved an identical spiritual influence and an “inner doctrine” superior to the exoteric and religious forms of a historical tradition.^[11] There are even instances in which the initiate has enjoyed this distinct character in a normal civilization and not only during the ensuing period of degeneration and inner fracture of the traditional unity. This character has become necessary and all-pervasive, especially in Europe in these latter times because of the involutive processes that have led both to the organization of the modern world and to the advent of Christianity (hence the merely initiatory character of the hermetic rex, of the Rosicrucian emperor, and so on).

Footnotes

1. My primary source is the reconstruction of the Eleusinian Mysteries proposed by V. Magnien in his Les Mystères d’Eleusis.

2. Because of their traditional character, each of these phases could generate innumerable comparisons. Crossing the waters, together with the symbol of navigating, is one of the most recurrent themes. The ship is one of the symbols ascribed to Janus, which later on was incorporated into the Catholic pontifical symbolism. The Chaldean hero Gilgamesh who walks on the “sun’s path” and on the “mountain path,” must cross the ocean in order to reach a divine garden where he will find the gift of immortality. The crossing of a great river and a number of various trials consisting in encounters with animals (totems), storms, and the like, is also found in both the ancient Mexican and Nordic-Aryan (crossing of the river Thund in order to arrive in Valhalla) journey after death. The crossing of the waters is found in the Nordic saga of the hero Siegfried, who says: “I can lead you there [to the ‘island’ of the divine woman Brunhild, a land ‘known to Siegfried alone’] riding the waves. I am accomplished in the true ways of the sea” (Niebelungenlied, 6); and it is also found in the Vedas where the king Yama, conceived as the “Sun’s son” and as the first among the beings who have found their way to the otherworld, is called “he who has gone far out into the sea.” (Ṛg Veda, 10.14.1–2; 10.10.1). The symbolism of the crossing is very frequent in Buddhism, while in Jainism we find the expression tīrthaṃkara (“ford-builder”).

3. See Introduzione alla magia (Milan, 1952) and also my other work, The Hermetic Tradition. It has been suggested that the requirement for the regal dignity consists in the control of the manas (the inner and transcendent root of the five senses), which is also a requirement for the successful practice of yoga and asceticism. See The Laws of Manu, 7.44.

4. As far as Rome is concerned we may notice the shift from the integral notion of regality to the narrower notion of rex sacrorum, the king’s competence being limited to the sacral dimension. This shift was justified to the degree to which the king had to engage in military matters.

5. “Just as fire instantly burns up the fuel that it touches with its brilliant energy, so a man who knows the Veda burns up all evil with the fire of his knowledge.” The Laws of Manu, 11.246. Also: “A priest who retains the Ṛg Veda in his memory incurs no guilt at all, even if he destroys these three worlds or eats food taken from anyone whatever” (11.262).

6. Analects, 12.1; 14.45.

7. Statesman, 290d–e.

8. De Iside et Osiride, 9.

9. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 3.2. Livy, The History of Rome, 1.20.

10. David was anointed by Samuel, “and the spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward.” 1 Sam. 16:13. In some medieval texts the oil of regal consecration was assimilated to the oil used to consecrate prophets, priests, and martyrs. During the Carolingian era, the bishop at the time of consecration pronounced the words: “May God in his mercy grant you the crown of glory; may He pour upon you the oil of the grace of the Holy Spirit, which He poured upon His priests, kings, prophets, and martyrs.”

11. For a definition of the specific nature of initiatory realization, see chapter 14 in my L’arco e la clava.