A number of the world's initiation rites are closed. The tradition that holds them does not publish their content, restricts who may witness them, and in several documented cases has formally asked that published descriptions be withdrawn from circulation.
This entry does not reproduce them, and the reason is worth stating rather than leaving as an apparent gap.
Much of what is available in print about closed initiations was obtained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by ethnographers who recorded ceremonies they were not entitled to record, sometimes by paying informants who had no authority to disclose, sometimes by simply attending. The peoples concerned have said so, repeatedly and on the record. That the material is now in libraries, out of copyright and searchable does not convert it into material that was ever properly obtained. Another article in this collection puts it in terms this one adopts: reproducing it now, on the excuse that it is already in print, compounds the original act.
The practical consequence is that a comparative account of coming-of-age rites will always be lopsided. Traditions that wrote their own ceremonies down and circulate them freely, which is most of the literate world religions, are described here in detail. Traditions that hold their ceremonies closed appear as an absence. That absence should be read as a restriction being observed and not as evidence that nothing is there, and certainly not as evidence that the closed rites are simpler or less developed than the published ones.
Where a tradition has itself published an account of a rite, or where a description was released by its own custodians, this site follows that account and says so.