“The interest of initiation for an understanding of archaic mentality lies predominantly in its showing us that the true man-the
spiritual man-is not given, is not the result of a natural process.
He is "made" by the old masters, in accordance with the models
revealed by the Divine Beings and preserved in the myths. These
old masters constitute the spiritual elites of archaic societies. It is
they who know, who know the world of spirit, the truly human
world. Their function is to reveal the deep meaning of existence
to the new generations and to help them assume the responsibility
of being truly men and hence of participating in culture. But since
for archaic societies "culture" is the sum of the values received
from Supernatural Beings, the function of initiation may be reduced to this : to each new generation, it reveals a world open to
the transhuman, a world that, in our philosophical terminology, we
should call transcendental.”