For most of human history, being a boy had an end.
They came for the boy.
They took him from his mother’s house. At night, with no warning. In some of the old rites, the mothers mourned the boy as though he had died. The village understood that he had, in some form.
What followed varied by place. Isolation. Hunger. Pain. A mark cut into the skin to symbolise the initiation. Then he returned, sometimes under a new name, to a village that now spoke to him differently.
In 1909, the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep mapped the pattern:
Separation.
Threshold.
Return.
The pattern persisted because the problem it solved will never change. A boy does not become a man by getting older.
Something else has to happen.
The Threshold
The threshold was a place you passed through, frightened and hungry, on the way to somewhere. It led the boy to become a man. Upon his return, the boy’s old way of seeing the world alchemised into something new. His previous habits no longer matched his new perception.
Today men feel the absence of that initiation even though they can’t name it. So they go looking for it.
The marathon. The ice baths. The ayahuasca ceremony. The vision quest. The darkness retreat. The fight camp.
Then the quieter ones, which don’t look like counterfeits at all: the new home. The move abroad. The new relationship.
Each one promises that special something.
None offers the complete return.
The boy goes through rites. But nothing confirms that something has most definitely transformed. He gets a glimmer. The taste. But not the whole deal.
So, he goes looking for a harder ordeal. Or a more novel one. Always something else to add.
And he continues this cycle… he knows something deeper is missing.
The False Choice
The old rites had one feature the modern man skips: the boy did not choose the rite. He was taken.
Choice is the mistake.
A man who chooses his ordeal also chooses its limits. He picks the pain he can survive. He picks the meditation retreat with access to his comforts. He picks the mentor he likes. He picks the psychedelics that sound promising. He picks what he thinks is hardcore.
He picks the experience that comes with a story, because the story sounds good to himself.
But initiation in ancient times killed the one who narrates.
The Rite Without Elders
The men are not coming at night. That world is gone.
If choosing the ordeal is the trap, he cannot choose his way out. Every forest he picks will be one he can survive only temporarily changed.
So what is left?
He cannot be taken, because nobody is coming. He cannot take himself, because whatever he picks, won’t lead to a permanent shift.
The elders are gone.
And even if they were here, the world is a different place, with more comforts than ever.
The initiation was always meant to lead to a permanent change in perception.
The man with a boy’s heart is trying to discover himself.
All seeking further perpetuates his boyhood.
Every rite he chooses is an addition. The old forest added nothing. It took everything away.
Sometimes the modern world still does this to a man without asking. The accident. The diagnosis. The loss he never saw coming.
But to initiate himself, he must stop.
He must deny himself.
He stops anything pleasurable linked to the flesh: no sex, no masturbation, no porn. This is a very different approach to looking for an initiation through a single experience. He stops looking for love from any single saviour or thing.
He stops all his dependencies until he’s left with nothing but work, darkness, pain, loneliness, and tears and uncontrollable sadness amidst a single drop of hope. His heart shakes because he can no longer numb himself with anything. He looks for a way out of his pain but he can find no way out. The pain takes over his soul and strengthens it in a way no single experience ever could. He denies himself everything the world taught him was pleasurable.
And as he peels the layers, he lets go of even more.
Nothing has been added. Everything has been taken.
In his darkest hour, a higher power steps in and he finds something that was never his to choose.
In that pit, he is slowly moulded into a man who can one day return to the village.
“Choose a time of denying yourself instead of discovering yourself” - Kristin Coman.