Neophyte

Neophyte (pronounced nee-uh-fahyt)

(1) A beginner or novice at something;  person who is new to a subject, skill, or belief.

(2) In the Roman Catholic Church, a novice in a religious order; a new convert or proselyte; a new monk.

(3) A person newly converted to a belief, as a heathen, heretic, or nonbeliever; proselyte.

(4) In Christianity, a name given by the early Christians (and still by the Roman Catholics), to those who have recently embraced the Christian faith, and been admitted to baptism, especially those converts from heathenism or Judaism (in most of the primitive Church, a person newly baptized).

(5) In botany, a plant species recently introduced to an area (in contrast to archaeophyte, a long-established introduced species).

1550-1460:  From the Ecclesiastical Latin neophytus (newly planted), from the Ancient Greek νεόφυτος (neóphutos) (newly planted), the construct of which was νέος (néos) (new) + φυτόν (phutón) (plant, child), the origin of which was a verbal adjective of phyein (cause to grow, beget, plant).  In the Greek used in the New Testament, the spelling was neophutos.  Neophyte is a noun & adjective, neophytic & neophytish are adjectives and neophytism is a noun; the noun plural is neophytes.

Churches and cults

In both the biblical sense of "a young scholar" and the general sense of "someone new to something", Cady Heron in Mean Girls (2004) was a neophyte.

Despite the lineage, use in English was rare prior to the nineteenth century.  The technical sense of ecclesiastical use is from I Timothy iii:6 and the general sense of "one who is new to any subject" was first recorded in the 1590s.  In early translations of the Bible, the neophyte was “a young scholar”, the implication being an “old scholar” could not be a neophyte by deferring his baptism or by long delaying his conversion to God which he had long before learned to be necessary.  As Christianity became increasingly corporatized in the search for bums on pews, view became less rigorous.  The word is also a favorite among cults.  In the symbolism of Freemasonry, the north refers to the outer or profane world and the east the inner world of Masonry; hence the cornerstones of Masonic Lodges are laid always in the south-east corner and the initiations of neophytes is always undertaken with them facing the north-east, symbolic of the position of neophytes, partly in the darkness of the former, partly in the light of the latter.

Cornerstone of a Masonic Lodge.

One of history's better known Masonic plots involves the White House's missing its cornerstone.  In October 1792, a group of freemasons assembled at a Georgetown tavern and paraded to the proposed site of the president’s mansion where they conducted certain rituals.  In one ceremony, they placed an inscribed cornerstone and then repaired to the inn to toast the event.  According to Masonic legend, some sixteen toasts were made, one consequence of which was they neglected to document the cornerstone's location.  Subsequent searches never located the stone and even when the White House underwent extensive renovations between 1948-1952 (engineers in 1948 threatened to condemn the building such was the state of structural decay) it wasn't discovered.  The post popular theory is it sits embedded between two stone walls near the Rose Garden.