3/3 Publication Day

In the early studies initiation was viewed in explicitly evolutionary terms. While James Frazer saw initiation as ‘the central mystery of primitive society’, he also believed that it would ultimately be superseded by modern science and disappear altogether.[1] Even in the 1950s, this prediction persists in the work of Mircea Eliade, who stated that in places such as Britain the institution was ‘practically nonexistent’.[2] Behind these predictions lay not only the brutal cultural hierarchy of evolutionism, rendered ideologically self-evident by the technological dominance of the northern empires, but the notion that initiation was an exclusively religious phenomenon that would have no place in societies governed by scientific rationalism. The case of AnonUK profoundly contradicts the future that Frazer and Eliade anticipated. While the truth claims of scientific rationalism are more powerful than ever, here they are unmoored from its forms of social organisation and its methods, and overlay a phenomenon that resembles a form of secularised religion. Moreover, initiatory processes have not disappeared with the advent of modern technologies, but in fact have changed and even possibly expanded with and through them.

Digital Initiation Rites, (2025, p. 25).

[1]    Cited in La Fontaine (1985, 20).

[2]    Eliade (1995, ix).