Initiation has often been accepted as a common phenomenon with a coherent meaning in the Greek world, and seen as the key to understanding a wide range of cultural and literary artefacts - this ground-breaking collection challenges this.

List of figures and tables, List of contributors, Preface, Acknowledgements, List of abbreviations and transliterations, PART I: Introduction, 1. Initiation: a concept with a troubled history, PART II: Female initiations, 2. What kind of rite of passage was the Ancient Greek wedding?, 3. Playing the bear and the fawn for Artemis: female initiation or substitute sacrifice?, PART III: Vidal-Naquet's Black Hunter, 4. Adolescent initiation in myth and tragedy: rethinking the Black Hunter, 5. Liminality as metaphor: initiation and the frontiers of Ancient Athens, PART IV: Initiation and themale community, 6. Adolescent hair-growing and hair-cutting rituals in Ancient Greece: a sociological approach, 7. Striding across boundaries: Hermes and Aphrodite as gods of initiation, PART V: Initiation and narrative patterns, 8. Initiation in myth; initiation in practice: the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and its performative context, 9. Who in hell is Heracles? Dionysus' disastrous disguise in Aristophanes' Frogs, PART VI: The initiation of ritual experts, 10. Evenius becomes a seer (Herodotus 9.93-5): a paradoxical initiation?, 11. The initiation of the magician: transition and power in Graeco-Roman Ritual, PART VII: Afterwords, 12. The initiatory paradigm in anthropology, folklore and history of religions, 13. Initiations and initiatory experience, Bibliography, Subject index, Index locorum, Foreign word index