May 7
To be initiated into a mystery psychologically is to have a mystical experience that changes you. You are no longer who you were before. You have undergone something that sets you apart from those who have not had the experience. Often, an initiation involves an element of isolation, of facing fear, or undergoing an ordeal. But perhaps just as often, the initiatory experience comes as a gift of grace, when mystery and profound beauty come together in a numinous moment of which we are a part. The new initiate feels archetypally twice-born: into life at birth, and now through a mystery, into a new state of being or new consciousness.
Crossing to Avalon
Jean Shinoda Bolen
