This small book contains lectures from the Haskell Readings series that I gave at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1956 on the general topic of “Patterns of Initiation.” Before sending the text to the publisher, I added an introduction, some notes and bibliographical apparatus, but retained the style of an oral presentation. In the form in which the book was conceived, it is addressed to any non-specialist reader interested in the spiritual history of mankind. The text of the book was translated from the original language using an artificial intelligence program. For the most part, the translation of the text is of very high quality, but in some cases, due to the imperfection of the technology, there may be incorrect phrase translations in the text, as well as single words and expressions may not be translated.