Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/69

 *itors of the Aryan and Semitic races also, at some period of their history, employed similar methods of rendering this epoch in life impressive and remarkable. Two distinguishing features characterize the rites of puberty—cruelty and mystery. There is always some painful ordeal to be undergone by the young men or boys who have attained the requisite age; and this ordeal is to be passed through in extreme secrecy as regards the opposite sex, and with a ceremonial of an unknown character, which is hidden from all but the initiated performers. Sometimes the puberty of women is also sanctified by religious ceremonies, and these follow the same rules, except that the female sex are not required to undergo such severe suffering as is often inflicted upon men. While, however, the cruelty is less, the mystery is the same. Men are not admitted to witness the performances gone through, and these are conducted in secluded places to which no access is allowed.

The meaning of these two features of the rites of puberty is not difficult to divine. Young men enter at that age on a period of their lives in which they are expected to display courage in danger and firmness under pain. Hence the infliction of some kind of suffering is an appropriate symbolical preparation for their future careers. Moreover, the manner in which they endure their agony serves as a test of their fortitude, and may influence the position to be assigned to them in the warlike expeditions of the tribe. But the primary motive, no doubt, is the apparent fitness of the infliction of pain at an age when the necessary pains of manhood are about to begin.

The explanation of the secrecy observed is equally simple. A mysterious change takes place in the physical condition at puberty, the generative functions, which are to play so large a part in the life of the individual, making their appearance then. It is this natural process to which the religious process bears reference. Without doubt the rites performed stand in symbolical relation to the new class of actions of which their subject is, or will be, capable. It is this allusion to the sexual instinct—a subject always tending to be shrouded in mystery—which is the origin of the jealous exclusion of women from the rites undergone by men, and of men from those undergone by women. The members of each sex are, so to speak, prepared