initiatory

“Then they started to speak to me, these erased, blotted-out things. They were both terminal and initiatory. They were little windows where, if I bent down to them, I could hear something.”

That initiatory dinner consisted of mashed potatoes and jellied cranberry sauce from the can, a dish he loved because its sweet-and-sour flavor tasted faintly of home.

Scattered throughout the cemetery, too, are graves of a number of members of the Abakuá, an Afro-Cuban initiatory society that may seem to have echoes of the Freemasons, but which has its roots in pre-colonial Nigeria and Cameroon.

As the French-Iranian sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar recently pointed out, “The typical trajectory of most French Islamic terrorists follows several steps: alienation from the dominant culture…discrimination in the blighted neighborhoods, a turn to petty crime, which leads to prison, and then more crime and more prison, religious awakening and radicalization, and an initiatory journey to a Muslim country like Syria…to train for jihad.”

In October, 1748, he entered his brother’s dissecting room, and whether the fitting of joints in cabinetware had been of initiatory service, or he had had access to the books of his medical relations in Glasgow, or that as a boy upon his father’s farm, observation of the domestic animals and of the wild inhabitants of wood and fell, had roused the desire to master the secrets of animated nature, sure it is that William speedily foretold a successful future for his new pupil as an anatomist.