Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugene 2025

Rituals of Purification and Initiation in Different Religious Traditions
World religions and religious studies

The first time I felt holy, I was ten. My cousin had just been dunked in a lukewarm swimming pool behind a Baptist church. The preacher shouted, water splashed, and the late July sun caught on her wet hair like a halo. I stood on the cracked pavement in flip-flops, watching something I didn't quite understand. It wasn't about God, not really. It was about change. Transformation. One version of her going under, another one climbing out.

Purification rituals have always fascinated me. Maybe because I never quite feel clean—in the moral sense, the metaphysical one. I know that's not a unique affliction. Religious studies 101 will tell you: humans have been obsessed with washing things away for as long as we've had the language to name guilt. And not just washing in the literal sense, though there's plenty of that too. There's ash and smoke and silence. There's fasting until your ribs show. There's letting go. There's bleeding.

These rituals—from Hindu ablutions in the Ganges to Catholic confessionals to Indigenous sweat lodges—are all trying to answer the same aching question: how do I begin again?

Water Knows the Way

Let me start with water because it's the easiest to understand. It's tactile, elemental. You can drown in it, or you can be born.

In Islam, wudu is the ritual washing before prayer. Hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, head, feet. It is methodical, almost meditative. I've watched Muslim friends do it, the way their fingers move like they're winding a clock. There is something in the repetition, the clarity of order, that suggests: I am ready now.

In Hinduism, bathing in the Ganges isn't just a custom. It's a cosmology. The river itself is divine—Ma Ganga, a goddess. To submerge yourself is to touch the infinite. And maybe, if you've carried shame long enough, you need something that vast to hold it.

Christian baptism, of course. I was never baptized. My parents were spiritual but suspicious of institutions. Still, I remember envying the kids who got the full ceremony: white robes, tears, the brief weightlessness of immersion. Like walking into death and getting spit back out into light.

It’s strange how many traditions involve wetness. Sweat, tears, rain, mikveh, full-body immersion, even holy spit (yes, Jesus healed a blind man with mud and spit in John 9). What is it about water that makes us feel touched by the divine? Maybe because it gets into places you didn't know were dirty.

Fire Forgets Nothing

But not all cleansing is gentle. Some rituals burn.

In Zoroastrianism, fire is sacred. Not just symbolic—sacred. It is the medium through which one communicates with Ahura Mazda, the supreme god. The fire temple becomes a conduit. There is something terrifying about that: the idea that God might live in something that consumes.

There are ancient purification rites where people burned their sins in parchment or tossed sacrifices into flames. In some Buddhist traditions, there's the goma fire ritual, where wooden sticks representing desires and obstacles are fed into a ceremonial fire while monks chant sutras that feel older than air.

Even in modern-day Catholicism, the Paschal fire is lit on Holy Saturday, just before Easter. It’s not just metaphor. It’s memory. Something must burn before something can rise.

Fire rituals don’t let you forget what you’re leaving behind. They demand you name it. Write it down. Watch it blacken.

Blood and Bone and Body

Some things you can't wash off.

In many Indigenous traditions across the Americas, Australia, and Africa, rites of passage into adulthood involve pain. Circumcision, scarification, tattoos made by bone and ash. I won't sanitize this. These are violent acts—yes, sometimes deeply contested—but also deeply communal. The pain isn't just endured; it's offered. As proof. As passage. As initiation.

It makes me think of menstruation rituals, too. There are cultures that isolate menstruating people, seeing them as impure. But others mark a first period with ceremony: a girl's body has changed, which means she has changed, which means everything must be reoriented. That transition deserves acknowledgment, maybe even awe.

And then there’s fasting. Hunger as prayer. Hunger as protest. Hunger as a way to listen better. It’s present in Judaism (Yom Kippur), in Islam (Ramadan), in Christianity (Lent), and beyond. There's a strange purity in it—not because the body shrinks, but because the self quiets.

These rituals aren’t about erasing the body, though some may pretend they are. They’re about feeling it. Fully. As if your skin is a threshold.

Confession and the Weight of Words

Let me pivot. What if purification isn't always physical?

I think about Catholic confessionals—wooden boxes, whispered sins, absolution meted out in Hail Marys. I grew up outside that world, but I remember watching movies where someone broke down behind that little screen, saying things they couldn’t say anywhere else. Like the silence gave them permission.

There's a Jewish concept called teshuvah that I love. It means "return," not just repentance. It's not enough to say you're sorry. You must face the same situation and choose differently. That feels more honest to me than a quick pardon. But also, terrifying. Because it means change isn't just performative. It's tested.

In AA, confession takes the form of steps. "We admitted we were powerless... we made a searching and fearless moral inventory... we made direct amends..." Ritual, stripped of temple walls, but sacred just the same.

Words can be holy. But only if they cost something.

What Are We Really Trying to Wash Away?

Here’s the part I can’t answer neatly.

When we talk about purification, we’re really talking about memory. About shame. About the invisible stains we believe disqualify us from love or wholeness or God. We invent rituals because we need a container for that grief. A script. A start.

But not all rituals work. Some get hollow. Some turn into performances. Some wound more than they heal. I think about how queer people have been told to purify themselves of who they are. How neurodivergent kids are taught to erase their stims. How purity culture (hi, 1990s evangelical America) made teenage girls believe their worth was a ring on the wrong finger.

So yeah. Rituals can redeem. But they can also control. They can cleanse or erase. The line is thin.

A Sweat Lodge in February

A few years ago, I sat in a sweat lodge in northern Minnesota. I had been invited by a friend, a Dakota woman who told me, gently but firmly, that this was not a tourist attraction. I went because I needed something I couldn’t name.

It was dark inside. Steam rose. We prayed in languages I didn’t understand. I wept, quietly, somewhere between the third and fourth round. No one asked why. That silence was the ritual, too.

When we crawled out, it was snowing. My lungs felt raw and clean. I don't know what left me in that lodge, or what entered. But I think I was different. I think something shifted.

VII. Let Me End Here (For Now)

I don’t believe in purity. Not really. I believe in process. In trying again. In rituals that give us somewhere to put the ache.

Maybe that’s what all these rites are: containers. Sacred pauses. Places where we say, "I can't carry this anymore," and something, someone, seen or unseen, answers, "You don't have to."

Not to be dramatic, but I think we all want to be forgiven. Even if we don’t believe in sin. Even if we say we’re fine.

Especially then.