Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/510

464 reunited to those who like him and before him have left this world, to the community of ancestors. He will enter that mythical society of souls which every society constructs in the image of itself. That society differs from the actual society of living men in being ideal, freed from limitations. The soul that enters it, however, will have to undergo an initiation analogous to that by which the youth is taken out of the society of women and children, and introduced into that of adult men. Initiation, the original integration which gives the individual access in the first place to the sacred mysteries of the tribe, implies a profound change of his person, a renewal of his body and soul, such as confers on him the needful religious and moral capacity. And the analogy of the two phenomena is so fundamental that this change is very often accomplished by the symbolical death of the aspirant, followed by his new birth to a higher life.

Moreover, there are analogies between death as represented in the collective consciousness and the other great crises of life—birth and marriage. In the ceremonies attendant on all three there are mystical perils incurred, and rites of purification to be performed. In all three there is a change of the mode of existence, a transition from one group to another; and these changes are expressed in the rites. Thus death is not conceived as a fact unique and without analogy. In our civilization the stages of social life are feebly marked. But less advanced societies, whose internal structure is massive and rigid, conceive a man's life as a succession of heterogeneous phases with fixed outlines, to each one of which corresponds a definite social class more or less organized. Consequently, each promotion of the individual implies the passage from one group to another, an exclusion—that is to say, a death—and a new integration—that is to say, a birth. Doubtless, these two elements do not always appear in the same perspective. According to the nature of the change it is sometimes the one, sometimes the other, that fixes the collective attention, and determines the dominant character of the event; but they are at bottom complementary. Death is for the social consciousness only a particular species of a general phenomenon.