Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Subcategories

Initiatory Practices

5 of 330 entries in Practices. Click any to see everything it connects to.

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The ongoing practice associated with initiation or a stage of formal training, as distinct from initiatory rituals under the ritual type, which record the discrete admitting rite rather than what surrounds or follows it. The two are companion entries kept under different types on purpose.

Facts
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
Preparations and disciplines undertaken to enter, or in the course of entering, a status a tradition confers by transmission - preliminary practices before tantric instruction, formal ordination, the seeking of a vision under a people's own law. The atlas records that they exist and on whose authority; it does not set out what is transmitted, which in several of these traditions is closed. 2
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseSourced to the subject's own account
Several practices grouped here are closed by the traditions that hold them and have been widely imitated by people without standing. The Lakota Summit V declaration of June 1993 objected by name to the conduct of the vision quest by outsiders. A published ethnographic account is a description, not a licence. 3
Directory
Category
Practices 1
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
A standard analytic category in the study of religion 2
Learn More
The initiatory practices

This group gathers initiatory practices, the rites and disciplines by which a person is admitted into a tradition, order or stage of spiritual life, marking a passage from outsider to insider or from one level of attainment to the next.

The browser will find initiatory practices from various traditions. The entries describe each practice's form and meaning, noting the tradition and the transition it marks.

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