More important even than the rites of birth and infancy are those of the attainment of adolescence, when the youth is admitted to the privileges of manhood and instructed in the secrets of the tribe. All round the world the lower culture has its ceremonies of initiation, which have sometimes survived in more refined forms in more highly organised societies. They involve seclusion from the common life, for no woman must be cognisant of what takes place, severe bodily trials to test the youth's power of endurance—fasts, scourging, loss of front teeth, tattooing (so that his status may be recognisable at once) and other forms of personal scarification and pain, under which the feeble sink, and the happiest are those who die, escaping the humiliations of the weakling's lot. Long abstinence in lonely places begets strange dreams and visions, and raises nervous excitability to its highest pitch. Strange forms appear with hideous faces and mysterious trappings; appalling sounds are heard; and it is only when the hours of terror are past that the initiated learns that the awful figures were his own kinsmen in masks and disguises, and the Australian is told that what he took to be the signal of Daramulun's advent was produced by the whirling of the bull-roarer. In the midst of these pantomimic incidents the novice dies to rise again. Perhaps he is buried in the fetish-house; or he passes through the bath into his new condition; or he is vivified by the sprinkling of blood. But he awakes to a fresh life. He must be utterly forgetful of the old; he must even sometimes feign ignorance of his parents' home and names. The elders then impart to him the customs and traditions of the tribe. He learns the rules of conduct, and duties of reverence and obedience to the aged, who are thus, in tribes without formal government, placed under the protection of religion. The strain of prolonged excitement and attention fixes precept and counsel indelibly upon his memory, and he knows that the penalty of betrayal will be death.
The ancient Indian ritual was more refined. The three upper castes, the Brahman, the noble, and the cultivator of the land, belonged to the "twice-born." Only to these was the study of the Veda permitted. When the youth was led to his teacher to be invested with the sacred thread, the symbol of his dignity, blessings were uttered and holy water was sprinkled on him. Then for the first time was he permitted to repeat the sacred verse (known as the Gāyatrī, Rig Veda, iii. 62, 10), "Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the divine Vivifier, may he enlighten our understandings," which is still recited daily by millions of devout Hindus. One of the later books of the Zoroastrian faith lays down that "it is necessary for all those of the good religion to celebrate the ritual and become navazûd, newly born," or born again. The ceremony began with a purification which lasted nine nights, and included sprinkling with water; the candidate for the priesthood must be of the age of fifteen; he must confess his sins, endure the scourge; and might then be regarded as regenerate.
Within the whole group of initiates secret societies were often formed, bound together by special vows, and using the instrumentality of religion. Observers in West Africa and elsewhere (they are also common in Polynesia and Melanesia) have differed widely as to their value, some denouncing them for their intolerable tyranny, others finding them useful agents of police. They are the forerunners of more purely religious associations such as may be seen in the mysteries of Greece. Here, too, were ceremonies of initiation, here were pantomimic representations of divine events, secrets of communion with deity, and promises of life beyond the grave. Most famous, of course, were the mysteries of Eleusis, in charge of the great family of the Eumolpids. Already in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, before the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, all Greece had been bidden to come to Eleusis, and receive initiation into the rites of the Lady Mother and the Maid. There were preliminaries of purification, which a Christian apologist like Clement of Alexandria could compare with the baptism of the Church. Cleansed from the stain of sin, the candidate was required to be devout and holy. What was the precise nature of the revelation which he was permitted to see is uncertain. The passion-drama of the mother's loss of her daughter, her search and recovery, may have grown out of some seasonal vegetation ceremonies. But they had taken on higher meanings. The secret might not be divulged in detail; there is, however, a large amount of testimony that ideas of death and re-birth or resurrection played a great part in this, as in other mystery-religions; the Homeric hymn to Demeter holds out intimations of immortality; and by some kind of communion with the deity the salvation of the believer was assured.
The rites of the Phrygian Sabazius touch the processes of the lower culture at more than one point. In his great oration "on the Crown" (315 B.C.) Demosthenes twits his opponent Æschines in such terms as these: "You assisted your mother in the initiations, you read aloud the books (the ritual prayers), and took part in the rest of the plot. You put on (or, you robed the candidates in) fawn-skins; you sprinkled them with water from the bowl; you purified and rubbed them with clay and bran, then you raised them from their purification, and bade them say, 'I have fled the bad, and found the better.'" On the gold Orphic tablets discovered in South Italy and Crete occur strange phrases: "I, a kid, fell into the milk," "O blessed and happy one, thou hast put off thy mortality and hast become divine," which are interpreted with great probability as references to a ritual of milk-baptism in which the initiate was born again.
That idea was certain expressed in the mysteries of Isis, which were widely spread in the Eastern Mediterranean (p. [40]). Here, too, was a solemn kind of death and re-birth; here, too, lustrations of the purest water, the priestly declaration of the pardon of the gods, the mystic revelation of the Goddess, herself identified with all deities in turn; and here, after the vision, the assurance of a blessed life to come. The candidate for initiation into the rites of Mithra must mount slowly through seven stages. The details of the ritual of the successive grades are unknown; but in accordance with ancient Iranian practice repeated ablutions were imposed till the cleansing waters had washed away all stains of guilt. The Mithraic sacraments so closely resembled Christian usage that they were vehemently denounced by Church writers as a Satanic parody. They were certainly supposed to secure happiness in the world to come. The believer who had passed through the blood-bath of the slaughtered bull was said to be "re-born for ever."
Associated with sacrifice and prayer, and partaking at once of the characters of magic and mystery, is the sacred dance. Rhythmic movement of body and limbs readily becomes the expression of strong feeling; and the feeling in its turn may be reawakened by the solemn renewal of the action. When it imitates the motions of the warrior or the huntsman it comes to possess a magical value, and the women who remain at home will dance all day while their husbands are engaged in battle or the chase. Does it not quicken their courage or enhance their skill? The child in an elementary school now learns his action-songs, and sows the grain and reaps the harvest. He does not, however, suppose that he is promoting nature's work. But the women whose social progress has advanced to agriculture, instead of imitating the gambols of the wolf or bear, will celebrate the operations of the fields to stimulate their effectiveness, and at a later stage still will go forth into the vineyards with timbrel and song. There are dances for courtship and marriage, dances in initiations and mysteries, dances even for the funeral. There are solemn preparations, as in the snake-dance of the secret order of the Snakes among the Moquis of Arizona, when the members must not only wash the snakes, but themselves as well and everything about them (in the same water), and fast for one day. Then any one who has been bitten will be healed, and when the pipe is lit, the clouds from it will rise and form rain-clouds, and the rain will fall upon the altar and the sacred things. Or the dance will serve for the reunion of the tribe, and becomes a great social as well as a religious institution. The Sun-dance of the Blackfoot Indians (p. [35]) is the supreme expression of their religion, and their great annual religious gathering. It must originate in a woman's vow for the recovery of the sick, and the ceremonies are spread over a considerable time. Some come for enjoyment, some to fast and pray. Some must discharge their vows for the healing of sick kinsfolk; others pay the price of deliverance from peril by the infliction of self-torture in the sun-lodge.
The vow, the fast, and all the varied forms of asceticism which Eastern religions have so abundantly produced, all involve common elements of sacrifice and self-subjection. The vow, indeed, has in part the nature of a contract. It is not magic, it is a bargain. There is no constraint, the deity may avail himself of what is offered, or may not. If Yahweh will go with me, says Jacob, and provide me food to eat and clothes to wear, he shall be my god and get his tithe. But the vow involves the surrender of something otherwise desirable. It is the same with the ascetic, who gives up food, or clothing, or sleep, or the bath, or speech, or a fixed home; who sits between four fires under a blazing sun; who lacerates his back with the scourge or his flesh with knives; who holds a flower-pot in his hand till the fingers grow round it immovably; who hangs himself up by hooks in his bare back, or loads himself from neck to feet with chains. Men may fast religiously to overcome bodily desire; or to prepare the higher insight for strange openings of vision. "The continually stuffed body," say the Amazulu, "cannot see secret things." Lacordaire bade the brethren of his Order scourge him that he might humble himself, and taste the pain of his Redeemer. But the extremer forms of asceticism (especially as a life-long practice) are always based on the idea that they are in themselves meritorious; they produce desert and desert leads to reward. They are a mode of establishing a claim on the future bounty of heaven; they are, after all, only another form of "doing business with the gods."