John Walt

A year and a half ago, I began studying male initiation because I wanted to understand how I could be intentional about raising my boys. Since then, I have read lots of books, talked to lots of people, and begun writing what I have learned into a simple and applicable model to guide how I raise my boys. Here is an overview of what I learned and some of the most important principles.

Every man is invited into a cycle that is much bigger than him. It has been in motion since the first man breathed the breath of life. Most ancestral communities had a much longer view of their lives than we do now. Some native American tribes would regularly consider the 7th generation effects in their decision-making. It becomes much easier to hold our own life more loosely when we think in terms of a multi-generational cycle that we play a part in. Our life is not about us.

Our culture has tragically lost its connection to what it means to be a man. I will write more on this in future notes, but I mention it here because, without initiation, we take away the process that gives a man his gender identity in the first place. The social cost of gender dilution is huge but it starts with not giving boys a path to become men. This topic is really important and I look forward to going in depth on it another time.

Initiation is both the preparation the young man goes through, preparing him for the journey of manhood, and the celebration and memorialization of that transition. Often, initiation is viewed as the ceremony marking the transition from boy to man. What this understanding misses is the intentional process of preparation and training that qualifies the boy to be initiated.

Fundamentally, initiation is the process of stepping out of the boy and into the man. The young boy exists in a fantasy world, his life revolves around him, and his role is simply to learn and grow. Through the initiation process, the young boy must be shown how to be a man and then led through a process where he dies and emerges as a man. I use the word die because it literally feels to the boy like a form of death. Everything that has made his life meaningful is falling away.

The three stages of initiation

There are three stages in most initiation ceremonies in ancestral communities around the world. The timelines and practices differ widely, but the format is consistent.

Separation: Removed from childhood and former identity.

The boy is removed from his familiar environment and former identity. This is often done through symbolic acts such as isolation, special clothing, or ritual cleansing, which mark the end of boyhood and signal the beginning of a significant transformation.

Transition: Liminal space where they face ordeals.

Transition is a period of being “in between” that can last from weeks to months. During this time, the initiate is no longer a boy but not yet recognized as a man. He undergoes instruction, challenges, or ordeals designed to teach him the values, skills, and responsibilities of adulthood. This stage is marked by ambiguity and personal growth.

Incorporation: Reintroduced to the community with a new status as a man.

Incorporation is when the initiate is formally welcomed back into the community with a new status as a man. This is typically celebrated with ceremonies or rituals that publicly acknowledge his transformation and affirm his new role and responsibilities within the group.

The Transformation

The modern world is built on a simple lie. Literally, the engines of Western society have this lie built into their very foundations. “You deserve to have what you want when you want it.” Interestingly, this is also the belief that the boy has before initiation. His whole life as a child was marked by the endless care for his needs. Now, suddenly in initiation, the purpose of his life is clearly shifting away from the meeting of his needs and into the role of contributing to the community and caring for other people's needs.

A young man today won’t usually go through this sort of transition on their own unless they have a tragedy in life, like serious health issues, the loss of a parent, or any number of other tragic burdens a young man is forced to carry that jolt him out of his childhood. So, in order to go through this process, the young man needs to be surrounded by older men. These men show the boy what it means to be a man. The father is the first guide a young man has, but he is often not the initiator. The father is one who prepares the boy, training his character, mind, will, and body for manhood, but the “second father” is the one who finishes the process and ultimately welcomes the young man into the man's journey.

I am not sure why it is hard for the biological father to lead the young man through initiation. I suspect it is because the father has been the protector and provider for the boy. In a healthy family, he would be a symbol of safety and love; it is therefore hard for the father to also be the one pulling the boy out of the childhood he helped create. The young man must select his own guide, and I think that usually makes it someone other than the father. The second father can also say things to the young man and expect things from him that a first father can’t without significantly straining or possibly breaking the relationship.

This transition into the man's journey is when a boy puts the final spear through the heart of his childish self and walks away as a new man. This is not to say that he loses the childlike joy and wonder, but he no longer believes that the purpose of his life is to serve himself. He has let go of the lie that “he deserves to have what he wants when he wants it.” His world is made right because his new belief is, “My role is to serve and protect others.”

Most men never have a second father, much less a biological father who can actually prepare them for the transition into manhood. Because of this, most men never go through initiation. This is why it is common now to see good men in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s who still believe that the purpose of their life is self-gratification. This doesn’t mean they are bad people, they just have architected their life to do the things they want, and feel the way they want to feel. I think this has a large part to play in declining birth rates, delayed marriages, and crazy divorce rates.

Richard Rohr wrote an incredible book about male initiation in 2004 called Adam's Return. He talks about five truths or promises that a man must accept in order to become a man.

Life is hard
You are not that important
Your life is not about you
You are not in control
You are going to die

Richard Rohr developed these five truths through his extensive study of traditional initiation rites across various cultures, combined with his own experiences leading men's retreats and spiritual formation work. He identified these truths as consistent lessons or messages conveyed to initiates in indigenous and ancient initiation rituals. These rites universally communicated hard but essential realities about life, such as the inevitability of suffering, the limits of personal importance and control, and the certainty of mortality.

These truths seem shocking to us today. Take your average young high schooler and share these with him, and he will likely want to run in the opposite direction. For most people throughout history, the challenges of life made these truths self-evident. In the death of the boy and the birth of the man, the initiate was accepting the hard realities of his new role as a man.

Unfortunately, if a man has not been initiated, then he has not experienced the freedom and joy that comes from letting go of the lies of childhood. Consider marriage, if you haven’t been initiated and accepted the five truths, then it can feel like a cruel joke. You are promised love, pleasure, and companionship, but within a short time, your experience seems to be only conflict, the burden of responsibility, and resentment. If you embrace the five truths and your role as a man, then marriage will be a great joy and a path to your deepest desires that you likely aren’t even aware of.

For the uninitiated man, every challenge in life is an opportunity to find a way to get what you want. For the initiated man, every challenge is an opportunity to grow further into his identity as a man. When a man makes it to his late 20s or older without being initiated, then the need for initiation arises as a profound disappointment, depression, and often anxiety. Because he begins to realize in undeniable ways that life is hard, he isn’t that important, his life isn’t about him, and he is not truly in control. When the idealism of the boy confronts the realities of a man’s life without initiation, it is deeply disappointing. Most men don’t recognize what it is and what's happening to them, so they often look for ways to feel better and begin self-medicating through stuff, experiences, medication, alcohol/drugs, and/or relationships.

The problem is that there is never enough of anything that almost works. So many men spend their lives going from thing to thing, trying to feel ok about themselves and their lives. I believe that most men just don't know what is actually happening to them. This process of preparation, initiation, and the journey of a man used to be quite possibly the most central social construct in tribal cultures. A version of it was present in the apprenticeship models before the industrial revolution. In fact, our modern world is likely the first in history to not have a male initiation process woven into the social structure. Unfortunately, the industrial revolution removed one of the biggest natural drivers of organic initiation. Fathers left the home to work every day, and suddenly the sons were not able to work alongside their fathers from a young age, learning every step of the way how to be a man. Second, it facilitated the shift away from work as mastery of a trade or skill into work as a role in a much larger machine/system that requires little mastery but much compliance. In doing so, we stepped away from the apprenticeship model of education in favor of classrooms. Apprenticeships were a natural initiation process where a young man spent countless hours with an older man learning a trade. So much more happened for the young man in those relationships, though, than simply skill development.

Suddenly, the model of apprenticeship began to vanish from the societal landscape. In its place, we erected schools and universities where we removed the children from the home to be educated and raised by a system instead of fathers, mothers, and their community. Instead of teaching mastery of skills, we substituted information and subjects. Now, kids were rewarded for compliance and memorization. We measured tests instead of character and growth. We built a system that taught people how to contribute to the industrial machine and not how to think. And worst of all, we removed the examples of how a man should live (fathers and mentors) from the daily rhythms of a young boy's life. What does it mean to be a man? We don’t even know anymore.

Think of all our major social problems; how many of them are perpetuated by uninitiated men? We have forgotten the importance of initiation, why we need it, and what it even is. Is it any wonder that so many look around and ask where have all the men gone?

- John Walt

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