How to make a man

Ancient wisdom points to how we got here, and what we must do now.

One of the handful of books I can easily say changed my worldview forever is called “Rites and Symbols of Initiation”, written by the great spiritual anthropologist and University of Chicago professor Mircea Eliade. In it Eliade presents the synthesis of years of investigation by himself and several graduate student assistants in which they dug into rituals marking the transition of boys to men in cultures ranging from Australian aboriginals to African primitive tribes to Shamanic cultures in Siberia to Oceania and Ancient Greece and everything in between.

From this synthesis, he noticed several unmistakable commonalities that speak authoritatively about the structure of the universe:

First, the commonalities existed and were undeniable. Cultures that could not possibly have interacted with each other, who in many cases had very little contact with anyone outside their culture, on different poles of the planet and alive at different times, had almost exactly the same rituals with the same symbols. Across Australian Aboriginal puberty rites, African initiation societies, Native American vision quests, and Siberian shamanic training, Eliade notes the same ritual sequence:

• The crux of the ritual was a symbolic, and in many cases very close to literal, death or dismemberment and then rebirth.
• The initiate is removed from his mother and from ordinary social life
• He is taken into a space that lies outside normal human order: forest, desert, mountains, or an enclosed hut that symbolizes separation from the village.
• During this period the initiate undergoes excruciating ordeals such as fasting, branding or tattooing, flogging, freezing, mock execution, and in many cases a small but literal dismemberment such as circumcision or taking flesh from somewhere else on his body, all at the hands of the men in his tribe.
• After the ordeal, the old identity is declared dead. The initiate is then ritually returned to the community with a new name and new status.

Across cultures and times Eliade found certainty among peoples that if the ordeal didn’t happen or if it wasn’t sufficiently brutal, men simply weren’t created. If an individual teenage boy refused or could not complete the ordeal for whatever reason, he failed to join to the community of adults and was excommunicated or killed, didn’t get a wife, didn’t get to share in the spoils of the hunt, etc. No cases of 30 year old dudes living in their mom’s basement were found in primitive cultures.

In most cases, by necessity, the ritual edged as close to death as possible, and in some cases resulted in actual death. Across most of the cultures, the practice was to tell the initiate’s mother and the women back in the village that the initiate had in fact died and would not be returning regardless of whether the boy who went into the forest actually survived. If he came back, he came back a man, and was unrecognizable as the boy who had left a year or two ago.

Interestingly, Eliade contrasts this with the path of women, who are initiated by Mother Nature via childbirth and its subsequent responsibilities. Men on the other hand must be initiated through extreme hardship purposely put on them by other men.

The last thing that stuck with me was that Eliade’s work suggested the energy and time a culture puts into the ceremony of initiation is inversely proportional to the proximity of the culture to imminent death. Primitive cultures who lacked refrigeration or even shelter and never had more than a few days sustenance within reach often spent years taking their pubescent young men into the woods and performing elaborate rituals in which all of the men of the tribe participated. We, on the other hand, might have a few hour baptism or bar mitzvah ceremony, or we might choose to not even do that. Somehow, cultures who had to conserve every bit of resources and energy lest they run out of food and perish consistently chose, across time and location, to devote quite a bit of energy and resources to the initiation of their young men. Cultures like ours with technology doing our work for us and inertia from the actions of previous generations of great men carrying us along don’t seem to feel the need.

So that’s how you make a man, it turns out. What happens if you don’t do any of this, as we don’t? Well, if all of our ancestors across time and geography were not all completely wrong- and all wrong in the same way, somehow- one might expect a certain progression of events:

Some severe hardship like a world war, depression, etc. initiates a batch of men and ushers in a prosperous period, let’s call it the 50’s. During this period of prosperity, if a positive, forceful, pre-emptive program is not undertaken to artificially create hardship for the upcoming generation of boys as it was in every single primitive culture, you might expect a very womanly period to follow, with feminism and chaos and the like carrying the day. If sufficient hardship does not then come around, for multiple generations over a long period, let’s call it 1945–2025, so long that the initiates of the last crisis have all passed away, a society might find itself literally not having any men in it, at which point you would expect complete insanity like widespread gender transitions and international pedophile rings running governments and a spray-tanned narcissistic celebrity being the best choice for leader we can find. This of course would spur a crisis and hardship not seen for 80 years or so, thus creating a new batch of men and consequent prosperity.

But all of our ancestors were probably backward uneducated unsophisticated creatures with nothing to tell us, right? This would never happen…

The ancients’ devotion of so many precious resources to creation of their men spoke to the fact that in situations where men are needed, creating men is one of the most pressing orders of business of the day. In cultures where you can make a living streaming yourself playing video games, the need is not as evident, but…there is good reason to believe it will be soon.