Part 8 (2/2)
(2) See also Themis, p. 21.
Let us pause for a moment. An Initiate is of course one who ”enters in.” He enters into the Tribe; he enters into the revelation of certain Mysteries; he becomes an a.s.sociate of a certain Totem, a certain G.o.d; a member of a new Society, or Church--a church of Mithra, or Dionysus or Christ. To do any of these things he must be born again; he must die to the old life; he must pa.s.s through ceremonials which symbolize the change. One of these ceremonials is was.h.i.+ng. As the new-born babe is washed, so must the new-born initiate be washed; and as by primitive man (and not without reason) BLOOD was considered the most vital and regenerative of fluids, the very elixir of life, so in earliest times it was common to wash the initiate with blood. If the initiate had to be born anew, it would seem reasonable to suppose that he must first die.
So, not unfrequently, he was wounded, or scourged, and baptized with his own blood, or, in cases, one of the candidates was really killed and his blood used as a subst.i.tute for the blood of the others. No doubt HUMAN sacrifice attended the earliest initiations. But later it was sufficient to be half-drowned in the blood of a Bull as in the Mithra cult, (1) or 'washed in the blood of the Lamb' as in the Christian phraseology.
Finally, with a growing sense of decency and aesthetic perception among the various peoples, was.h.i.+ng with pure water came in the initiation-ceremonies to take the place of blood; and our baptismal service has reduced the ceremony to a mere sprinkling with water. (2)
(1) See ch. iii.
(2) For the virtue supposed to reside in blood see Westermarck's Moral Ideas, Ch. 46.
To continue the quotation from Miss Harrison: ”More often the new birth is stimulated, or imagined, as a death and a resurrection, either of the boys themselves or of some one else in their presence. Thus at initiation among some tribes of South-east Australia, when the boys are a.s.sembled an old man dressed in stringy bark-fibre lies down in a grave. He is covered up lightly with sticks and earth, and the grave is smoothed over. The buried man holds in his hand a small bush which seems to be growing from the ground, and other bushes are stuck in the ground round about. The novices are then brought to the edge of the grave and a song is sung. Gradually, as the song goes on, the bush held by the buried man begins to quiver. It moves more and more, and bit by bit the man himself starts up from the grave.”
Strange in our own Baptismal Service and just before the actual christening we read these words, ”Then shall the Priest say: O merciful G.o.d, grant that old Adam in this child may be so BURIED that the new man may be raised up in him: grant that all carnal affections may die in him, and that all things belonging to the Spirit may live and grow in him!” Can we doubt that the Australian medicine-man, standing at the graveside of the re-arisen old black-fellow, pointed the same moral to the young initiates as the priest does to-day to those a.s.sembled before him in church--for indeed we know that among savage tribes initiations have always been before all things the occasions of moral and social teaching? Can we doubt that he said, in substance if not in actual words: ”As this man has arisen from the grave, so you must also arise from your old childish life of amus.e.m.e.nt and self-gratification and, ENTER INTO the life of the tribe, the life of the Spirit of the tribe.”
”In totemistic societies,” to quote Miss Harrison again, ”and in the animal secret societies that seem to grow out of them, the novice is born again as THE SACRED ANIMAL. Thus among the Carrier Indians (1) when a man wants to become a Lulem or 'Bear,' however cold the season he tears off his clothes, puts on a bear-skin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or four days. Every night his fellow-villagers will go out in search parties to find him. They cry out Yi! Kelulem (come on, Bear), and he answers with angry growls. Usually they fail to find him, but he comes back at last himself. He is met, and conducted to the ceremonial lodge, and there in company with the rest of the Bears dances solemnly his first appearance. Disappearance and reappearance is as common a rite in initiation as stimulated killing and resurrection, and has the same object. Both are rites of transition, of pa.s.sing from one to another.” In the Christian ceremonies the boy or girl puts away childish things and puts on the new man, but instead of putting on a bear-skin he puts on Christ. There is not so much difference as may appear on the surface. To be identified with your Totem is to be identified with the sacred being who watches over your tribe, who has given his life for your tribe; it is to be born again, to be washed not only with water but with the Holy Spirit of all your fellows. To be baptized into Christ ought to mean to be regenerated in the Holy Spirit of all humanity; and no doubt in cases it does mean this, but too often unfortunately it has only amounted to a pretence of religious sanction given to the meanest and bitterest quarrels of the Churches and the States.
(1) Golden Bough, Section 2, III, p. 438.
This idea of a New Birth at initiation explains the prevalent pagan custom of subjecting the initiates to serious ordeals, often painful and even dangerous. If one is to be born again, obviously one must be ready to face death; the one thing cannot be without the other. One must be able to endure pain, like the Red Indian braves; to go long periods fasting and without food or drink, like the choupan among the Western Inoits--who, wanders for whole nights over the ice-fields under the moon, scantily clothed and braving the intense cold; to overcome the very fear of death and danger, like the Australian novices who, at first terrified by the sound of the bull-roarer and threats of fire and the knife, learn finally to cast their fears away. (1) By so doing one puts off the old childish things, and qualifies oneself by firmness and courage to become a worthy member of the society into which one is called. (2) The rules of social life are taught--the duty to one's tribe, and to oneself, truth-speaking, defence of women and children, the care of cattle, the meaning of s.e.x and marriage, and even the mysteries of such religious ideas and rudimentary science as the tribe possesses. And by so doing one really enters into a new life. Things of the spiritual world begin to dawn. Julius Firmicus, in describing the mysteries of the resurrection of Osiris, (3) says that when the wors.h.i.+pers had satiated themselves with lamentations over the death of the G.o.d then the priest would go round anointing them with oil and whispering, ”Be of good cheer, O Neophytes of the new-arisen G.o.d, for to us too from our pains shall come salvation.” (4)
(1) According to accounts of the Wiradthuri tribe of Western Australia, in their initiations, the lads were frightened by a large fire being lighted near them, and hearing the awful sound of the bull-roarers, while they were told that Dhuramoolan was about to burn them; the legend being that Dhuramoolan, a powerful being, whose voice sounded like thunder, would take the boys into the bush and instruct them in all the laws, traditions and customs of the community. So he pretended that he always killed the boys, cut them up, and burnt them to ashes, after which he moulded the ashes into human shape, and restored them to life as new beings. (See R. H. Matthews, ”The Wiradthuri tribes,” Journal Anthrop. Inst., vol. xxv, 1896, pp. 297 sq.)
(2) See Catlin's North-American Indians, vol. i, for initiations and ordeals among the Mandans.
(3) De Errore, c. 22.
(4) [gr Qarreite, mustai ton qeou seswsmenou,]
[gr Estai gar hmin ek ponwn swthria.]
It would seem that at some very early time in the history of tribal and priestly initiations an attempt was made to impress upon the neophytes the existence and over-shadowing presence of spiritual and ghostly beings. Perhaps the pains endured in the various ordeals, the long fastings, the silences in the depth of the forests or on the mountains or among the ice-floes, helped to rouse the visionary faculty.
The developments of this faculty among the black and colored peoples--East-Indian, Burmese, African, American-Indian, etc.--are well known. Miss Alice Fletcher, who lived among the Omaha Indians for thirty years, gives a most interesting account (1) of the general philosophy of that people and their rites of initiation. ”The Omahas regard all animate and inanimate forms, all phenomena, as pervaded by a common life, which was continuous with and similar to the will-power they were conscious of in themselves. This mysterious power in all things they called Wakonda, and through it all things were related to man and to each other. In the idea of the continuity of life a relation was maintained between the seen and the unseen, the dead and the living, and also between the fragment of anything and its entirety.” (2) Thus an Omaha novice might at any time seek to obtain Wakonda by what was called THE RITE OF THE VISION. He would go out alone, fast, chant incantations, and finally fall into a trance (much resembling what in modern times has been called COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS) in which he would perceive the inner relations of all things and the solidarity of the least object with the rest of the universe.
(1) Summarized in Themis, pp. 68-71.
(2) A. C. Fletcher, The Significance of the Scalp-lock, Journal of Anthropological Studies, xxvii (1897-8), p. 436.
Another rite in connection with initiation, and common all over the pagan world--in Greece, America, Africa, Australia, New Mexico, etc.--was the daubing of the novice all over with clay or chalk or even dung, and then after a while removing the same. (1) The novice must have looked a sufficiently ugly and uncomfortable object in this state; but later, when he was thoroughly WASHED, the ceremony must have afforded a thrilling ill.u.s.tration of the idea of a new birth, and one which would dwell in the minds of the spectators. When the daubing was done as not infrequently happened with white clay or gypsum, and the ritual took place at night, it can easily be imagined that the figures of young men and boys moving about in the darkness would lend support to the idea that they were spirits belonging to some intermediate world--who had already pa.s.sed through death and were now waiting for their second birth on earth (or into the tribe) which would be signalized by their thorough and ceremonial was.h.i.+ng. It will be remembered that Herodotus (viii) gives a circ.u.mstantial account of how the Phocians in a battle with the Thessalians smeared six hundred of their bravest warriors with white clay so that, looking like supernatural beings, and falling upon the Thessalians by night, they terrified the latter and put them to instant flight.
(1) See A. Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 274 sq.
Such then--though only very scantily described--were some of the rites of Initiation and Second Birth celebrated in the old Pagan world. The subject is far too large for adequate treatment within the present limits; but even so we cannot but be struck by the appropriateness in many cases of the teaching thus given to the young, the concreteness of the ill.u.s.trations, the effectiveness of the symbols used, the dramatic character of the rites, the strong enforcement of lessons on the nature and duties of the life into which the candidates were about to enter.
Christianity followed on, and inherited these traditions, but one feels that in its ceremonies of Baptism and Confirmation, which of course correspond to the Pagan Initiations, it falls short of the latter. Its ceremonies (certainly as we have them to-day in Protestant countries) are of a very milk-and-watery character; all allusion to and teaching on the immensely important subject of s.e.x is omitted, the details of social and industrial morality are pa.s.sed by, and instruction is limited to a few rather commonplace lessons in general morality and religion.
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