"You’ve Got to Grow or Go": Initiation, Performance, and Reality Television
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Institute for the Study of Performance and Spirituality
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This article explores initiation in the Western Mystery Tradition as a performance practice in which individuals engage with their communities through esoteric tradition. Primarily, I examine how initiation is a defining metaphor in performance studies and how ethnographies conducted in Pagan communities construct an initiation paradigm, thus engaging performance as a category for understanding relations between self and other. Performance itself as a critical mode is a hotly contested topic between both Pagan practitioners and Pagan Studies scholars. With that in mind, I directly apply this notion of initiation as performance to the 2004 reality television program, Mad Mad House, in which contestants had to undergo various rites of passage for a cash prize. The show was mostly predicated on collisions between contestants constructed as "normal" people and the so-called "Alts," larger than life individuals who represented various "alternative lifestyles" and spiritual paths, such as witchcraft, voodoo, vampirism, naturism and modern primitivism. Thus, the contestants were called upon to navigate in a foreign spiritual environment and "perform" as successful initiates. Within the world of reality TV, we vicariously experience individuals’ initiations into celebrity. This essay further suggests the performative implications of televised initiations.
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