The importance of the concepts of death and rebirth to that of initiation are in one sense so fundamentally linked that it appears that one cannot speak properly of initiation without also referring to death and rebirth. Such an account is explicit for example in the work of Eliade, who writes that “the central moment of every initiation is represented by the ceremony symbolizing the death of the novice and his return to the fellowship of the living.” (xii) For Eliade, therefore, any process of initiation entails by definition the concepts of death and rebirth. Such a conclusion appears entirely coherent on an intuitive level. When we think about our common sense conceptions of initiation, this means a certain point of transition. The initiation, whatever it may be, from the ceremony of marriage or baptism to something more bureaucratic, such as graduating high school or college, means that we have finished with one stage of our existence. But this end point is not our end, but a new beginning, and thus it becomes apparent how both death and rebirth are fundamental to the initiation process.

Eliade concisely summarizes the symbolic value of death and rebirth to the initiation ritual as follows: “All the rites of rebirth or resurrection, and the symbols that they imply, indicate that the novice has attained to another mode of existence, inaccessible to those who have not undergone the initiatory ordeals, who have not tasted death.” (xiii) At the center of initiation, in other words, is a premise which implies a differentiation in what Eliade terms modes of existence, or, more simply put perhaps, how a given individual lives. The initiation is a point of transition, from one way of living to another. Returning to the marriage example, the individual who enters the marriage ritual lives in a different way than he or she has before, through the initiation of marriage now essentially leading an existence which is entirely different than that of the single person, an existence which is deeply tied to the marriage partner. Contemplating this initiation process and point of transition from the perspective of concepts of death and rebirth, therefore, the death aspect clearly indicates the end of the first mode of existence.

After an initiation, let us say, from university, one is no longer a student, but someone with a degree, a social status that has been changed forever. Therefore, there is a death of this first way of living of the individual. But this death, clearly, is also not the end: there is a rebirth, a rebirth into what Eliade would call the new mode of existence, which is now the university graduate, who now enters into a different world. Using this mundane example, therefore, there are now new possibilities for the university graduate, new jobs that he or she can pursue, as well as a new status within society as a whole.

Arnold van Gennep provides a similar point of view to that of Eliade about the integral link between an initiation process and the concepts of death and rebirth, whereby “the recurrence of rites, in important ceremonies among widely differing peoples, enacting death in one condition and resurrection in another” (13) becomes the basis of all forms of initiation. Once again, the theme is similar to that of Eliade: there is in a given rite or initiation the termination of one mode of existence and the beginning of another. The person who enters the ritual, as van Gennep writes, “enacts” death, that is, the ritual marks an end to the person’s former way of living, his or her in a certain sense past life. But this is clearly not the end of the initiation process: there is a subsequent step, the step of what von Gennep calls resurrection or rebirth, whereby the individual now continues to exist but in an entirely different manner than before.

Following the readings of Eliade and van Gennep, in one sense it appears inconceivable to think about initiation without a conceptual symbolic language of life and death. Every initiation marks a point of transition, a change in the individual’s life. In this case, there is a clear symbolic language of death and rebirth. This is because change in itself marks a point of transition, the end of one way of living and the beginning of another.