In totemistic societies, and in the animal secret societies that seem to grow out of them, the novice is born again as the sacred animal.  Thus among the Carrier Indians[33] when a man wants to become a Lulem, or Bear, however cold the season, he tears off his clothes, puts on a bearskin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or four days.  Every night his fellow-villagers will go out in search parties to find him.  They cry out Yi!  Kelulem ("Come on, Bear”) and he answers with angry growls.  Usually they fail to find him, but he comes back at last himself.  He is met and conducted to the ceremonial lodge, and there, in company with the rest of the Bears, dances solemnly his first appearance.  Disappearance and reappearance is as common a rite in initiation as simulated killing and resurrection, and has the same object.  Both are rites of transition, of passing from one state to another.  It has often been remarked, by students of ancient Greek and other ceremonies, that the rites of birth, marriage, and death, which seem to us so different, are to primitive man oddly similar.  This is explained if we see that in intent they are all the same, all a passing from one social state to another.  There are but two factors in every rite, the putting off of the old, the putting on of the new; you carry out Winter or Death, you bring in Summer or Life.  Between them is a midway state when you are neither here nor there, you are secluded, under a taboo.

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To the Greeks and to many primitive peoples the rites of birth, marriage, and death were for the most part family rites needing little or no social emphasis.  But the rite which concerned the whole tribe, the essence of which was entrance into the tribe, was the rite of initiation at puberty.  This all-important fact is oddly and significantly enshrined in the Greek language.  The general Greek word for rite was t{)e}l{)e}t{-e}.  It was applied to all mysteries, and sometimes to marriages and funerals.  But it has nothing to do with death.  It comes from a root meaning “to grow up.”  The word t{)e}l{)e}t{-e} means rite of growing up, becoming complete.  It meant at first maturity, then rite of maturity, then by a natural extension any rite of initiation that was mysterious.  The rites of puberty were in their essence mysterious, because they consisted in initiation into the sanctities of the tribe, the things which society sanctioned and protected, excluding the uninitiated, whether they were young boys, women, or members of other tribes.  Then, by contagion, the mystery notion spread to other rites.

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We understand now who and what was the god who arose out of the rite, the dromenon of tribal initiation, the rite of the new, the second birth.  He was Dionysos.  His name, according to recent philology, tells us—­Dio_nysos_, “Divine Young Man.”