Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/240

202 The initiated boy is from seven to eight months under strict rule, eating only certain prescribed food and secluded from social intercourse, except of the old men. The long course of alternate fasting and suffering is a very severe ordeal. It has often been observed that young men come out of it exhausted and sometimes half dead.

I have said that the purposes of the initiation change during the social evolution, but the rites are the more conservative part of the ceremony. When, in time, the character of the initiation becomes very different, the rites remain the same or vary slowly, and contradict the new aims of the ceremony. If we compare the ritual sides of the ceremony among Australians, we find therein some absurdities, i. e., rites which are without real and rational meaning, or are quite useless, or even contradict the essence of the ceremony. We have a right to look at them as survivals of the more remote stage of culture, when the initiation had other destinations and they were in consent with its purpose; intelligent, rational and useful at one time, they become to-day more or less absurd in their connection with the ceremony. These primitive features consist in the following: (1) The youth does not know the time of his initiation. Among the tribes of the Darling river a dance is arranged at sunrise, a sham fight is got up to attract the youth's attention, and then he is caught and carried off into the bush. In Central Australia the boys run away when the camp cry aloud, and wander alone in woods; while a sham-fight takes place, the old men practise most horrible customs during the whole night; the women and children are ordered off to a distance from the camp, where they remain beating a kind of wooden trough with their hands, the men replying to the noise in like manner. When the youth is captured, the women of the tribe pretend always a sorrow and set up a lamentation, resist the seizure by throwing firebrands to his captors, until they are driven to their miams and compelled to stop there. (2) The youths are very strictly separated from their tribe, i. e., from the women and uninitiated boys. No woman is permitted to see either the ceremony or the youth. So strong is this feeling against the women knowing anything of the secret rites, that one of the Kurnai head men said to Mr.