Suffering (bodily pain) as Religious Necessity

Van de Port invokes Eliade’s concept of “hierophany”: “Religious practices in candomble have always privileged the human body as the prime site of what Mircea Eliade has called ‘heirophany’, the appearance of the sacred. Initiation rituals, animal sacrifice, spirit possession – in all these activities, the human body in performative action is the medium used to gain access to the mysterious fundamentos, the ‘deep knowledge’”. (p. 445). Further in the paper, he notes the arduous and prolonged initiation processes as requisite to access the arcane knowledge of the candomble. Where/how does bodily suffering figure here? In the sense of a performative action, suffering itself may be requisite to furthering religious knowledge – as in, to perform the reveal and dissemination of knowledge and secrets. Why has suffering figured integrally in all the rituals we have studied (the Hauka rituals, particularly) – where is suffering place in religious performance and “imagination”? Can the supernatural only be sufficiently comprehended through the body that is specifically in pain, the body that is on the verge of being broken?