THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INITIATION AND INITIATION RITES
[Sidenote: The psychological significance of initiation]
The phantasies of return to the womb and of re-birth, with which we have
just been concerned, are intimately connected with another phantasy
which is met with surprisingly often in the investigation of dreams and
other manifestations of the Unconscious--that of initiation. The idea of
initiation corresponds to a wish that is very deeply rooted in the human
mind. In the psycho-analytic study of individuals it is found perhaps most
frequently in the shape of a desire for sexual initiation at the hands
of the parents (or of obvious substitutes for these); such initiation
constituting (in the mind of the phantasy maker) at once a removal of the
prohibition which the parents had formerly laid upon all manifestations
of sexuality and an invitation to penetrate those mysteries of sexual,
reproductive and adult life generally, which they have hitherto jealously
guarded for themselves.
[Sidenote: Initiation and Incest]
It thus appears that in certain minds initiation is regarded as a
necessary preliminary to the exercise of the powers and privileges of
maturity in the sexual or in any other sphere of life. At the same
time, however, the phantasy of initiation is often made the means of
surreptitiously bringing about a satisfaction of the old, prohibited,
and largely superseded desires of infancy. Thus there are frequently
clear indications that it is not only initiation into sex life in general
that is required, but initiation into the incestuous form of this life
which was characteristic of the first object-love of the child. Indeed
the very persistence of these infantile desires constitutes one of the
principal motives of the initiation phantasy; it is just the fact that
all the sexual trends are to an appreciable extent still tinged with
the atmosphere of the repressed incestuous tendencies, which makes the
removal of the inhibitions and prohibitions attaching to these tendencies
to be felt as necessary, before sex life of any kind can be enjoyed with
freedom. Thus a boy may dream of "initiation" at the hands of his father,
because this signifies to him a removal of the prohibition imposed by
his father on all sexual activity on the part of the boy--a prohibition
imposed (as is readily recognised by the Unconscious) in virtue of the
boy's original direction of his love towards the mother: without such sign
of approval and change of attitude on the father's part[70], the boy may
feel that the original prohibition is still too powerful to be overcome
and that his sexual life will remain for ever under the ban of the strong
inhibitions aroused by a sense of parental disapproval[71].
Similar considerations apply to the non-sexual aspects of life, in which
at maturity the youth takes his place as an equal of the father, to whom
he has hitherto looked up as a superior.
[Sidenote: Initiation ceremonies]
The important and far-reaching changes in general conduct and, more
particularly, in the attitude to be adopted toward the elder members of
an individual's own family, on the attainment of full growth--involving
as they do the overcoming of many habits and inhibitions formed during
the long period of human infancy and childhood--are not of a kind to be
accomplished without difficulty and conflict. With a view to diminishing
this difficulty and to overcoming the conflict of motives which the
accomplishment of these changes necessarily involves, there exists a well
nigh universal tendency to endow the transition from childhood to maturity
with something of a solemn or religious character, calculated at one and
the same time to reinforce the motives proper to maturity and to impress
the now full grown members of the community with the privileges and
responsibilities of their new condition. This tendency has found definite
and elaborate expression in the rites and ceremonies of initiation which
are to be found in societies of every stage of culture and in every part
of the world. These ceremonies are of very considerable interest and
importance for our present purpose, for here, as so often elsewhere, the
results obtained from the study of racial and social customs on the one
hand and from the investigation of the unconscious mental tendencies of
the individual on the other, serve very largely to amplify and corroborate
one another, leading ultimately to a degree of certainty and precision
which it would be difficult or impossible to attain by the pursuit of
either discipline alone.
[Sidenote: Initiation and re-birth]
Since the change from childhood to maturity involves readjustments of
such a fundamental kind as to constitute to some extent an entrance into
a new phase of life, it is not surprising that the initiation ceremony
has often in one or more of its aspects taken the form of a symbolic
process of re-birth; the re-birth phantasy, as we have seen, being closely
associated with the idea of moral or spiritual conversion or regeneration.
The process of re-birth in these ceremonies may indeed on occasion be
represented by something actually approaching an imitation of the act of
birth, as in the case of the Kikuyu of British East Africa, who "have a
curious custom which requires that every boy just before circumcision
must be born again. The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her
feet, she pretends to go through all the labour pains and the boy on
being reborn cries like a babe and is washed. He lives on milk for some
days afterwards[72]." Elsewhere the novice is swallowed by a monster and
again disgorged, thus simulating the return to the womb and the re-birth
therefrom[73]. In still other cases a drama of death and resurrection is
enacted by the novices or played before them[74]. Frequently an essential
part of the process of initiation consists of a more or less prolonged
period of seclusion about the time of puberty[75]; girls especially being
often confined in small huts for weeks, months or in some cases years, at
or before the time of their first menstruation[76].
[Sidenote: General and sexual objects in initiation]
These initiatory rites would seem, like the womb and birth phantasies
which we have already studied, to have in the main two principal objects
in view; first, an introduction of the initiated into the rights and
responsibilities belonging to an adult member of the community; secondly,
an introduction into sexual life.
As a means to the former end, the novice usually receives instruction
in the laws, customs, religious beliefs and ceremonial practices of his
tribe, or undergoes certain (often very severe) trials of capacity and
endurance with a view to ascertaining his fitness to enter into the
privileges of maturity.
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.
[Sidenote: The abandonment of infantile tendencies on the part of the
initiated]
Many of the details of these initiation ceremonies have, 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].
[Sidenote: The attitude of the initiators towards the initiated]
In the cruel rites which are so often inflicted on the novices 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].
[Sidenote: Prohibition and licence]
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 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]
[Sidenote: Re-birth and Reconciliation]
The monster from whose belly the novices are reborn 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 70: The following three dream extracts from the writer's own
psycho-analytic experience afford very clear examples of the kind of dream
to which reference is here made.
(1) "I was trying to catch a train, but a gate leading to the platform
was closed and I could not succeed in opening it. Then my father suddenly
appeared, shook the gate violently, opened it and hurried me across the
platform. He opened the door of a compartment and pushed me in. I found a
lady sitting there." The lady here was associated with the mother and the
opening of the gate and door symbolised the sexual act.
(2) "An elderly man" (father symbol) "led me upstairs" (coitus symbol.
_Cp._ Freud, "Interpretation of Dreams," p. 252) "to the interior of
a church or chapel" (mother symbol). "Here hymns were being sung"
(initiation ceremony) "I thought I ought to sing too, but had some bother
to find the right place in the hymn book. Then one of the people said to
me 'You are one of us.'"
(3) "I wanted to get into a house, but could not find the way in. Suddenly
our doctor" (in this case, as so often, a father substitute) "came along
and said: 'A doctor always goes in by the window'. From a bag he brought
out a long elastic instrument" (phallic symbol). "with which he opened a
window on the first floor" (symbol of sex intercourse). "We entered and I
found it was my mother's bedroom. The doctor said 'You should now go to
sleep' and I prepared to go to bed."
As will be seen from these examples, the initiation idea may be easily
combined with the idea of returning to the mother's womb discussed in the
last chapter. This combination is perhaps still more clearly shown in the
following dream of the patient, who provided Example 2. "I was on a boat
sailing on a river or canal which gradually became narrower and shallower.
Finally the boat grounded on a sandy bottom. I got out and walked up a
staircase into a cathedral where some ceremony was going on, in which I
took part."]
[Footnote 71: Thus in a case known to me the inhibition in question
constituted one of the principal factors in the production of a very
prolonged condition of sexual impotence in married life.]
[Footnote 72: Sir J.G. Frazer, "Totemism and Exogamy." IV. 228.]
[Footnote 73: Sir J.G. Frazer, "Balder the Beautiful." II. 239.]
[Footnote 74: _Op. cit._ II. 243, 246.]
[Footnote 75: _Op. cit._ II. 253, 259.]
[Footnote 76: _Op. cit._ I. 22.]
[Footnote 77: A careful study of these all important aspects of
the initiation ceremonies has recently been made by Th. Reik (Die
Pubertätsriten der Wilden, _Imago_, 1915, IV. 125, 189) from whose work
many of the statements and conclusions here given have been taken.]
[Footnote 78: An amnesia the production of which is often facilitated by
the use of intoxicants.]
[Footnote 79: Sir J.G. Frazer, _op. cit._, I. 22.]
[Footnote 80: Sometimes apparently this procedure is very successful. Thus
a well known psychologist has told me: "On passing every illumination
during the night of the Jubilee, my father, who was carrying me, smacked
me 'to make me remember the day'. I was four, and I have remembered!"]
[Footnote 81: In many of these, as for instance the nautical practice of
ducking or "keel hauling" those who are crossing the equator for the first
time, it is possible also to trace certain typical symbols of the re-birth
phantasy.
The sexual aspects of initiation are apt to be particularly prominent
in the case of boys entering a criminal or anti-social "gang". Thus an
acute student of this subject writes to me: "I have often found that a
delinquent boy was initiated into sexual knowledge and practices on the
first evening that he joined his "gang"; _e.g._ in one such gang every
new member had to exhibit himself. He was asked if he knew "what it (the
penis) was for"; this was explained; and after certain criticisms were
passed, the leader, after a thorough inspection, declared "you will do".
There was also a catechism: "Do you know what your mother and father
do..." etc; the result being to discredit them in the eyes of the boy and
to lead him to emulate them or at least to defy and despise them."]
[Footnote 82: A. Schweiger, "Der Ritus der Beschneidung." _Anthropos._
1914.]
[Footnote 83: K. Weule, "Negerleben in Ostafrika," 304. Quoted by Reik.,
_op. cit._]
[Footnote 84: Chazac, "La religion des Kikuyu." _Anthropos_ II. 317, 1910.]
[Footnote 85: Sir J. G. Frazer, "Totemism and Exogamy." II. 144.]