 the archetype of initiation. In a psychological sense the hero image is not to be regarded as identical with the ego proper. It is better described as the symbolic means by which the ego separates itself from the archetypes evoked by the parental images in early childhood. Dr. Jung has suggested that each human being has originally a feeling of wholeness, a powerful and complete sense of the self, and from the self, the totality of the psyche, the individualized ego consciousness emerges as the individual grows up. Within the past few years the works of certain followers of Jung have begun to document the series of events by which the individual ego emerges during the transition from infancy through childhood. This separation can never become final without severe injury to the original sense of wholeness, and the ego must continually return to re-establish its relation to the self in order to maintain a condition of psychic health. It would appear from my studies that the hero myth is the first stage in the differentiation of the psyche. I have suggested that it seems to go through a fourfold cycle by which the ego seeks to achieve its relative autonomy from the original condition of wholeness. Unless some degree of autonomy is achieved the individual is unable to relate himself to his adult environment, but the hero myth does not ensure that this liberation will occur. It only shows how it is possible for it to occur so that the ego may achieve consciousness. There remains the problem of maintaining and developing that consciousness in a meaningful way so that the individual can live a useful life and can achieve the necessary sense of self-distinction in society. Ancient history and the rituals of contemporary primitive societies have provided us with a wealth of material about myths and rights of initiation whereby young men and women are weaned away from their parents and forcibly made members of their clan or tribe. But in making this break with the childhood world the original parent archetype will be injured and the damage must be made good by a healing process of assimilation into the life of the group. The identity of the group and the individual is often symbolized by a totem animal. Thus the group fulfills the claims of the injured archetype and becomes a kind of second parent to which the young are first symbolically sacrificed only to re-emerge into a new life. In this drastic ceremony which looks very like a sacrifice to the powers that might hold the young man back, as Dr. Jung has put it, we see how the power of the original archetype can never be permanently overcome in the manner envisaged by the hero-dragon battle without a crippling sense of alienation from the fruitful powers of the unconscious. We saw in the myth of the twins how their hubris expressing excessive ego-self separation was corrected by their own fear of the consequences which forced them back into a harmonious ego-self relation. In tribal societies it is the initiation right that most effectively solves this problem. The ritual takes the novice back to the deepest level of original mother-child identity or ego-self identity, thus forcing him to experience a symbolic death. In other words, his identity is temporarily dismembered or dissolved in the collective unconscious. From this state he is then ceremonially rescued by the right of the new birth. This is the first act of true consolidation of the ego with the larger group expressed as totem, clan, or tribe, or all three combined. The ritual, whether it is found in tribal groups or in more complex societies, invariably insists upon this right of death and rebirth which provides the novice with a right of passage from one stage of life to the next, whether it is from early childhood to later childhood or from early to late adolescence and from then to maturity. Initiatory events are not of course confined to the psychology of youth. Every new phase of development throughout an individual's life is accompanied by a repetition of the original conflict between the claims of the self and the claims of the ego. In fact, this conflict may be expressed more powerfully at the period of transition from early maturity to middle age, between 35 and 40 in our society than at any other time in life. And the transition from middle age to old age creates again the need for affirmation of the difference between the ego and the total psyche. The hero receives his last call to action in defensive ego consciousness against the approaching dissolution of life in death. At these crucial periods the archetype of initiation is strongly activated to provide a meaningful transition that offers something more spiritually satisfying than the adolescent rights with their strong secular flavor. The archetypal patterns of initiation in this religious sense known since ancient times as the mysteries are woven into the texture of all ecclesiastical rituals requiring a special manner of worship at the time of birth, marriage or death. As in our study of the hero myth, so in the study of initiation we must look for examples in the subjective experiences of modern people and especially of those who have undergone analysis. It is not surprising that there should appear in the unconscious of someone who is seeking help from a doctor specializing in psychic disorders images that duplicate the major patterns of initiation as we know them from history. Perhaps the commonest of these themes to be found in young people is the ordeal or trial of strength. This might seem to be identical with what we have already noticed in modern dreams illustrating the hero myth such as the sailor who had to submit to the weather and to beatings, or that proof of fitness represented in the hike through India of the man without a rain hat. We can also see this theme of physical suffering carried to its logical end in the first dream I discussed when the handsome young man became a human sacrifice on an altar. This sacrifice resembled the approach to initiation, but its end was obscured. It seemed to round off the hero cycle to make way for a new theme. There is one striking difference between the hero myth and the initiation right. The typical hero figures exhaust their efforts in achieving the goal of their ambitions. In short, they become successful even if immediately afterward they are punished or killed for their hubris. In contrast to this, the novice for initiation is called upon to give up willful ambition and all desire and to submit to the ordeal. He must be willing to experience this trial without hope of success. In fact, he must be prepared to die, and though the token of his ordeal may be mild, a period of fasting, the knocking out of a tooth or tattooing, or agonizing, the infliction of the wounds of circumcision, subincision, or other mutilations. The purpose remains always the same, to create the symbolic mood of death from which may spring the symbolic mood of rebirth. A young man of 25 dreams of climbing a mountain, on top of which there is a kind of altar. Near the altar, he sees a sarcophagus with a statue of himself upon it. Then a veiled priest approaches, carrying a staff on which there glows a living sun-disk. Discussing the dream later, the young man said that climbing a mountain reminded him of the effort he was making in his analysis to achieve self-mastery. To his surprise, he finds himself, as it were, dead, and instead of a sense of achievement he feels deprivation and fear. Then comes a feeling of strength and rejuvenation, as he is bathed in the warm rays of the sun-disk. This dream shows quite succinctly the distinction we must make between initiation and the hero myth. The act of climbing the mountain seems to suggest a trial of strength. It is the will to achieve ego consciousness in the heroic phase of adolescent development. The patient had evidently thought that his approach to therapy would be like his approach to other tests of manhood, which he had approached in the competitive manner characteristic of young men in our society. But the scene by the altar corrected this mistaken assumption, showing him that his task is rather to submit to a power greater than himself. He must see himself as if he were dead and entombed in a symbolic form, the sarcophagus, that recalls the archetypal mother as the original container of all life. Only by such an act of submission can he experience rebirth. An invigorating ritual brings him to life again as the symbolic son of a son-father. Here again we might confuse this with a hero cycle, that of the twins, the children of the sun. But in this case we have no indication that the initiate will overreach himself. Instead, he has learned the lesson in humility by experiencing a rite of death and rebirth that marks his passage from youth to maturity. According to his chronological age, he should already have made this transition, but a prolonged period of rested development has held him back. This delay had plunged him into a neurosis for which he had come for treatment, and the dream offers him the same wise counsel that he could have been given by any good tribal medicine man, that he should give up scaling mountains to prove his strength and submit to the meaningful ritual of an initiatory change that could fit him for the new moral responsibilities of manhood. The theme of submission as an essential attitude toward the emotion of the successful initiation rite can be clearly seen in the case of girls or women. Their rite of passage initially emphasizes their essential passivity, and this is reinforced by the psychological limitation on their autonomy imposed by the menstrual cycle. It has been suggested that the menstrual cycle may actually be the major part of initiation from a woman's point of view, since it has the power to awaken the deepest sense of obedience to life's creative power over her. Thus she willingly gives herself to her womanly function, much as a man gives himself to his assigned role in the community life of his group. On the other hand, the woman, no less than the man, has her initial trials of strength that lead to a final sacrifice for the sake of experiencing the new birth. This sacrifice enables a woman to free herself from the entanglement of personal relations and fits her for a more conscious role as an individual in her own rite. In contrast, a man's sacrifice is a surrender of his sacred independence. He becomes more consciously related to woman. Here we come to that aspect of initiation which equates man with woman and woman with man in such a way as to correct some sort of original male-female opposition. Man's knowledge, logos, then encounters woman's relatedness, eros, and their union is represented as that symbolic ritual of a sacred marriage which has been at the heart of initiation since its origins in the mystery religions of antiquity. But this is exceedingly difficult for modern people to grasp, and it frequently takes a special crisis in their lives to make them understand it. Several patients have told me dreams in which the motif of sacrifice is combined with the motif of the sacred marriage. One of these was produced by a young man who had fallen in love but was unwilling to marry for fear that marriage would become a kind of prison presided over by a powerful mother figure. His own mother had been a strong influence in his childhood, and his future mother-in-law presented a similar threat. Would not his wife to be dominate him in the same way these mothers had dominated their children? In his dream, he was engaged in a ritual dance along with another man and two other women, one of whom was his fiance. The others were an older man and wife who impressed the dreamer because, despite their closeness to each other, they seemed to have room for their individual differences and did not appear to be possessive. These two therefore represented to this young man a married state that did not impose undue constraint on the development of the individual nature of the two partners. If it were possible for him to achieve this condition, marriage would then become acceptable to him. In the ritual dance, each man faced his woman partner, and all four took their places at the corners of a square dancing ground. As they danced, it became apparent that this was also a kind of sword dance. Each dancer had in his hand a short sword with which to perform a difficult arabesque, moving arms and legs in a series of movements that suggested alternate impulses of aggression and submission to each other. In the final scene of the dance, all four dancers had to plunge the swords into their own breasts and die. Only the dreamer refused to accomplish the final suicide and was left standing alone after the others had fallen. He felt deeply ashamed of his cowardly failure to sacrifice himself with the others. This dream brought home to my patient the fact that he was more than ready to change his attitude to life. He had been self-centered, seeking the illusory safety of personal independence, but inwardly dominated by the fears caused by childhood subjection to his mother. He needed a challenge to his manhood in order to see that unless he sacrificed his childish state of mind, he would be left isolated and ashamed. The dream and his subsequent insight into its meaning dispelled his doubts. He had passed through the symbolic rite by which a young man gives up his exclusive autonomy and accepts his shared life in a related, not just heroic, form. And so he married and found appropriate fulfillment in his relationship with his wife. Far from impairing his effectiveness in the world, his marriage actually enhanced it. Quite apart from the neurotic fear that invisible mothers or fathers may be lurking behind the marriage veil, even the normal young man has good reason to feel apprehensive about the wedding ritual. It is essentially a woman's initiation rite in which a man is bound to feel like anything but a conquering hero. No wonder we find in tribal societies such counterphobic rituals as the abduction or rape of the bride. It enabled the man to cling to the remnants of his heroic role at the very moment that he must submit to his bride and assume the responsibilities of marriage. But the theme of marriage is an image of such universality that it also has a deeper meaning. It is an acceptable even necessary symbolic discovery of the feminine component of a man's own psyche, just as much as it is the acquisition of a real wife. So one may encounter this archetype in a man of any age in response to a suitable stimulus. Not all women, however, react trustingly to the married state. A woman patient who had unfulfilled longings for a career which she had had to give up for a very difficult and short-lived marriage, dreamed that she was kneeling opposite a man who was also kneeling. He had a ring that he prepared to put on her finger, but she stretched out her right hand ring finger in a tense manner, evidently resisting this ritual of marital union. It was easy to point out her significant error. Instead of offering the left hand ring finger, by which she could accept a balanced and natural relation to the masculine principle, she had wrongly assumed that she had to put her entire conscious, that is, right-sided identity in the service of the man. In fact, marriage required her to share with him only that subliminal natural, that is, left-handed part of herself in which the principle of union would have a symbolic, not a literal or absolute meaning. Her fear was the fear of the woman who dreads to lose her identity in a strongly patriarchal marriage, which this woman had good reason to resist. Nevertheless, the sacred marriage as an archetypal form has a particularly important meaning for the psychology of women, and one for which they are prepared during their adolescence by many preliminary events of an initiatory character.