Forgotten → Found
The rites return when the path is walked. Q4
An interview with Mark Nara, by Alexander Illiad
This post is part of an ongoing Q&A series. Thirty questions in total exploring themes of initiation, identity, meaning, and transformation.
Each one stands alone, but together they map a deeper conversation I’ve been guiding for years through Tattoo Pathway.
Rather than polished essays or formal teachings, these responses reflect the way things actually unfold in dialogue.
The first question started with a dream. You can go back to it here if you want to see where this began.
Question 4 (AI):
You say we’ve lost our rites of passage. What do you mean by that? What role do initiations play in shaping identity and what happens when they’re missing?
Answer (MN):
We haven’t lost them, you can’t loose them because there kind of inbuilt, we have just forgotten how to access them. Or if we've lost something, we’ve lost the well-worn paths that used to carry us through them.
There was a time when rites of passage were known. Not just remembered by elders or buried in the past, but lived. They were walked. They were shared. These paths helped move individuals from one stage of life to the next. Childhood innocence into adventurous adolescence into devotional adult psychology and eventually elder hood. Each stage introduced something new: knowledge, role, responsibility, belonging.
You can think of these rites as a trail through the forest. Once well-travelled, once clear. But now, most of them are overgrown. Some still exist, but they’re rarely walked. Others have vanished entirely. And without them, people are left wandering. Alone. Unseen. Unprepared.
Initiation is not just for the individual. It brings value back to the group. It transforms a person into someone who can contribute. It aligns them with the deeper rhythm of life, biological, psychological, societal, spiritual. It answers questions we often don’t even know we’re asking: Where do I belong? What is my role? Who will recognise me on the other side of this struggle?
When those rites are missing, people don’t stop seeking initiation, they just engage with it in other ways. Often unconsciously, that’s what we’re seeing now. We have generations of men, especially, who never crossed important thresholds. Plenty try, but miss the mark or lack the know how, some avoid it completely. Men who were never witnessed. Never recognised. As a result they linger in the lost boy psychology long after their bodies have aged.
We’re living in a self-initiatory age now. People are trying to build their own anchors. Trying to find their way without guides. While that’s noble and necessary, it’s also risky. Here’s why; Without healthy elders or guides, without shared maps or rooted culture, many initiations happen unconsciously. They can be disorienting, even traumatic. When no one is holding the frame, the process can become chaotic.
Instead of opening a door to growth, it can leave someone stuck. What should have been a threshold becomes a loop. The energy accumulates but doesn’t transform. Movement stalls. The moment passes, but the weight remains.
Deep in the soul, the alarm still rings. At certain points in our life, something wakes up and says: It’s time. Sometimes that comes through conflict. Sometimes through childbirth. Illness. Grief. Vision. Travel. Or a longing that refuses to go away. These are sacred signals. They’re uncurated aspects that used to be supported by rites rising up from below, the formal structures are gone now.
What I’ve come to realise, through tattooing, is that many of the people I meet are already in the river, they just don’t know how to get to the other side. They’re already actively seeking initiation, potentially multiple attempts into the process. They’re already calling for it.
I’ve been lucky enough to apprentice¹ under people who still carry some of that knowledge, people who understand the old tracks and have taught me how to guide others, gently, in a modern world.
Because this isn’t about recreating the past. It’s about clearing a new path. One that’s rooted in the sacred, but fit for now. One that honours the mystery without needing to control it.
Some people end up asking, what are we being initiated into exactly? In this contemporary frame, when the tracks are faint and the guides are few?
We’re being initiated into the mystery itself. Into a relationship with, a greater power. The more we see, the more we realise how much we don’t know. Its agnotological ². That’s the paradox: the more we grow, the closer we move to humility. To reverence. It’s that orientation, the bowing to the mystery, that unlocks the sacred.
¹ Apprenticeship.
One of the most transformative chapters in my life was discovering a spiritual connection to the Creator under the guidance of a traditional holy man named Michael “Walks the Wind.” He was a Road Priest, the Head of the Many Birds Lodge, and held multiple hoops along the east coast of Australia.
He took me on as an apprentice. I was not adopted, although some were. He understood who needed to be brought into a family physically, and who simply needed to be spiritually tethered and guided. For me, it was the latter. Apprenticeship, in this context, was not just about learning a method. It was about entering into a covenantal relationship, a commitment to serve, to be shaped, and to come into alignment with a deeper way of being.
The original meaning of "apprentice" includes being bound by agreement to a master for the purpose of learning their art or mystery. It implies more than skill acquisition. It points to the process of apprehending something with the mind and the spirit. This was exactly what happened in my case.
What I received was not a fixed or preserved system, but a way of seeing. A way of relating to transformation and the sacred, and of understanding the human experience beyond surface rituals. This guidance shaped the direction of my life and laid the foundation for everything I now do through Tattoo Pathway.
It is important to be clear that Tattoo Pathway is not traditional in the strict sense. We are not carrying an unbroken lineage or replicating tribal methods exactly as they were. Our work is coetaneous³. It was born in this time, alongside contemporary movements. But it has been shaped by encounters with traditional knowledge, through people who held it with integrity and passed it forward with care.
Tattoo Pathway draws from those lineages with respect. Not to imitate them, but to let them influence the depth and direction of what we create. The wisdom I received was not a set of instructions. It was something delivered through relationship, offered by hand and heart. What we carry now is a living practice, rooted in the present, and open to continual refinement.
² Agnotological.
Agnotology is the study of culturally induced ignorance. Not just the absence of knowledge, but the conditions that shape what remains unknown.
Its root, agnōsis, simply means “not knowing.” But here, it goes further. The more we uncover, the more complex the landscape becomes. Each answer unfolds into new questions. Enlightenment doesn’t banish the dark—it makes us aware of it. Wisdom doesn’t remove ignorance—it reveals it.
As Philippe Verdoux writes in his story In the Dark,
“Enlightenment leads to benightedness, science entails nescience.”
True insight invites humility. In a time where information is everywhere, the risk is not just in what we don’t know, but in forgetting how vast the unknown still is.
³ Coetaneous.
Coetaneous means "of the same age" or "originating at the same time."
It's similar to contemporary, but slightly more precise. While contemporary usually means existing or happening at the same time as something else, coetaneous emphasises a shared beginning point or origin. It comes from Latin co- (together) and aetas (age).
By saying Tattoo Pathway is coetaneous means it originated in this era, alongside modern movements or needs—but was informed by older streams of wisdom. It wasn’t handed down whole from tradition. It emerged in conversation with it.
So it's not traditional in the sense of an unbroken lineage. It’s born now—but it echoes something ancient.