To avoid harsh distinctions, to bridge over abrupt transitions, is always a mark of advancing civilization; but the savage, in his ignorance and fear, lamentably over-stresses distinctions and transitions.  The long process of education, of passing from child to man, is with him condensed into a few days, weeks, or sometimes months of tremendous educational emphasis—­of what is called “initiation,” “going in,” that is, entering the tribe.  The ceremonies vary, but the gist is always substantially the same.  The boy is to put away childish things, and become a grown and competent tribesman.  Above all he is to cease to be a woman-thing and become a man.  His initiation prepares him for his two chief functions as a tribesman—­to be a warrior, to be a father.  That to the savage is the main if not the whole Duty of Man.

This “initiation” is of tremendous importance, and we should expect, what in fact we find, that all this emotion that centres about it issues in dromena, “rites done.”  These rites are very various, but they all point one moral, that the former things are passed away and that the new-born man has entered on a new life.

Simplest perhaps of all, and most instructive, is the rite practised by the Kikuyu of British East Africa,[30] who require 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.”

More often the new birth is simulated, or imagined, as a death and a resurrection, either of the boys themselves or of some one else in their presence.  Thus at initiation among some tribes of South-east Australia,[31] when the boys are assembled an old man dressed in stringy bark fibre lies down in a grave.  He is covered up lightly with sticks and earth, and the grave is smoothed over.  The buried man holds in his hand a small bush which seems to be growing from the ground, and other bushes are stuck in the ground round about.  The novices are then brought to the edge of the grave and a song is sung.  Gradually, as the song goes on, the bush held by the buried man begins to quiver.  It moves more and more and bit by bit the man himself starts up from the grave.

The Fijians have a drastic and repulsive way of simulating death.  The boys are shown a row of seemingly dead men, their bodies covered with blood and entrails, which are really those of a dead pig.  The first gives a sudden yell.  Up start the men, and then run to the river to cleanse themselves.