ritual ordeals which test the faith of someone being initiated into an ascetic spiritual discipline.

Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye [Amazon, Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Bataille Story of the Eye ritual ordeals test faith initiated spiritual discipline

Consider also:

  1. “The value of a ritual is that it involves self-discipline and belonging. The ritual is pointless in itself so the doing of it is purely a matter of discipline and the willingness to do it.”
  2. “Most pornography—the books discussed here cannot be excepted—points to something more general than even sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend ‘the personal’ is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly. It provides mainly demonic vocabularies in which to situate that need and from which to initiate action and construct rites of behavior.”
  3. “the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.”