On the sexual side the novice receives permission to marry and generally to indulge his sexual tendencies (the process of initiation being often succeeded by a period of unusual licence), but at the same time is instructed in the numerous prohibitions and taboos as regards persons, circumstances and occasions which are usually placed upon such indulgence.
Many of the details of these initiation ceremonies have, The abandonment of infantile tendencies on the part of the initiated directly or indirectly, reference to the emotional attitude of the children towards their parents with which we have been concerned in the earlier chapters of this book[77]. A general effort to repress the mental attitude which the novice has at an earlier period adopted towards his parents is to be observed in the—real or feigned—amnesia[78] which so often occurs after the initiation, the newly initiated sometimes failing to recognise even their nearest relatives and being thus compelled to start life with them on a new footing. The same tendency to break loose from the old attitude is manifested in the actual separation from the parents which seems always to take place at the period of seclusion or at or before the ceremony of re-birth, the affectionate farewell which is taken before such separation (especially of the son from the mother) and in many of the symbolic prohibitions of the period of seclusion, such as that in virtue of which girls must, during their seclusion, neither touch the earth (a universal mother symbol), nor be exposed to the sun (an almost equally universal father symbol)[79].
In the cruel rites which are so often inflicted on the novices The attitude of the initiators towards the initiated by the elder members of the community it is possible to see a manifestation of that fear and hatred which fathers often feel towards their sons and which mothers often feel towards their daughters—feelings which often correspond in nature and intensity to the equivalent emotions in the children themselves (Cp. below Ch. XIV); the pretended killing or death of the novice being frequently of the nature of a punishment on the talion principle for the thoughts of parricide or matricide which the children may themselves have entertained towards their parents. Before initiation youths are often not allowed to carry arms, probably because of the fear that they may be tempted to hurt or kill the father; sometimes, however, before they can be admitted to the full privileges of maturity, they must have killed a man—in order, probably, to work off their hostile feelings on some third person who may serve as a substitute for the father who was the original object of these feelings.
The hostile attitude of the older members of the community towards the novices, which finds an outlet in the cruelties practised at initiation, does not however spring exclusively from sexual jealousy on the part of the elders, but also to some extent from the disinclination which they feel to admitting the youths—at any rate without some payment—into the numerous secrets and privileges from which they have hitherto excluded them, and from the general tendency to grudge the abandonment of that superiority over the youths which they themselves have hitherto enjoyed. The manifestation of these feelings in some form of cruelty is most often rationalised as a desire to prove that the novices are worthy of admission to the privileges and responsibilities of the initiated and to ensure, by adding to the impressiveness of the occasion, that they will remember what they have seen and heard during the initiation ceremonies[80]. Similar motives, leading to similar manifestations, may often be observed even in highly civilised communities, where the initiation is usually one destined to introduce the individual not into adult life in general but into some special class, institution or society, or into some corporate body consisting of persons who have enjoyed some special kind of experience or mode of life. Under this head, for instance, come many of the time honoured customs and ceremonies, to which boys on entering school or joining a "gang", students on going to college, or persons joining some professional society or guild, are made to submit[81].
In other aspects of the ceremonies, however, the motive of sexual jealousy stands unmistakably displayed. Thus the rites of circumcision and subincision, the pulling out of hairs from the head, face or pubic region and the knocking out of teeth, which so frequently precede or accompany the process of initiation, are all symbols of castration; a penalty which it is desired to inflict—really or symbolically—from a number of distinct though closely connected motives, the most important being:—(1) as a means of rendering impossible the realisation of forbidden sexual cravings, (2) as a threat to show that the power of the elders still exists and that it will be exercised should the prescribed limits be overstepped, (3) as a punishment for past incestuous desires or acts (as is shown, for instance, in the superstition that if the wound caused by circumcision does not readily heal it is because the youth has already been guilty of incestuous connection[82]). The same object of preventing incest is sought in the stern "avoidances" which Prohibition and licence are often practised at the same time; as, for instance, that by which a youth must keep very carefully from all contact with his mother, even to the extent of avoiding her footprints.
But if all love in the old direction is forbidden, sexual activity in other directions is often encouraged as a substitute, as in such instructions as the following: "Thou, my pupil, art now circumcised. Thy father and thy mother, honour them. Go not unannounced into their house, lest thou find them together in tender embrace. But have no fear of maidens; sleep and bathe together with them"[83]. Even so, however, there usually remain, as we might expect from the general nature of displacement, some remnants of the old incestuous fixation; such as those, for instance, which manifest themselves in the belief that after the first sexual connection of a youth, either he himself or his partner in the act must shortly die (as a punishment, we must suppose, for the sin committed)—a belief which leads young men to fall upon and have forcible intercourse with old women (mother substitutes)[84]. Here the youth is definitely permitted some degree of (symbolic) incestuous indulgence before he finally abandons his infantile desires. A still wider permission of the same kind is, however, granted in the fairly widespread practice of removing the usual sexual taboos on all or most of the prohibited persons during "the period of revelry which follows initiation, where the nearest relationships—even those of own brother and sister—seem to be no bar to the general licence," even though shortly afterwards these same "brothers and sisters may not so much as speak to one another".[85]
The monster from whose belly the novices are reborn Re-birth and Reconciliation would appear in many cases to represent the young men's grandfather, through him their dead ancestors and ultimately the ancestral founder of the tribe. This rather astonishing fact as regards the supposed sex of the monster is probably due in the first place to a psychic identification of the child with his grandfather—an identification of very frequent occurrence and considerable significance, the psychological foundations of which can however be more appropriately discussed in a later chapter. (Ch. XIV). The novice in being born from the body of the grandfather becomes in a sense a re-incarnation of the grandfather and is endowed with all his powers and attributes.
In a secondary and "rationalised" sense, this process of re-birth from the grandfather has been interpreted as the expression of a desire to re-create the youth as the son of his tribe rather than as the son of his mother, i. e. to symbolise and emphasise the fact that he has now exchanged the narrow sphere of family rule and affection for the wider one of obedience and loyalty to the community; at the same time representing a means of obtaining freedom from the old fixation of love upon the mother (since he is now born not from her but from the tribal ancestor), and through this of becoming reconciled to the father. This same motive of reconciliation based on the renunciation of incestuous desire and on the establishment of common love and interest between those of the same sex, is exemplified also in the Age Classes, Men's Clubs and Secret Societies found in so many primitive peoples, to membership of which women are in the majority of cases rigorously excluded.
Thus it would appear that the ideas underlying the almost universal social custom of the initiation ceremony are those which we have already met with in the study of the development of the individual mind in relation to the family: showing thereby that these ideas are to be found not only in minds of a certain constitution or of a particular age, race, or type of culture, but represent a general human characteristic, having its foundations deeply rooted in the history of mankind; a part of our mental inheritance which has to be reckoned with in all efforts at social or individual improvement, a factor for good or evil which education, instruction or upbringing may perhaps modify but can scarcely hope to eradicate.