of the
lads to the village is not explained by the writer who describes them;
but the analogy of similar ceremonies observed at initiation by many
other races allows us to divine it with a fair degree of probability. As
I have already observed in a former lecture, the ceremony of initiation
at puberty is very often regarded as a process of death and
resurrection; the candidate is supposed to die or to be killed and to
come to life again or be born again; and the pretence of a new birth is
not uncommonly kept up by the novices feigning to have forgotten all the
most common actions of life and having accordingly to learn them all
over again like newborn babes. We may conjecture that this is why the
young circumcised Papuans, with whom we are at present concerned, march
back to their village with closed eyes; this is why, when bidden to sit
down, they remain standing stiffly, as if they understood neither the
command nor the action; and this, too, we may surmise, is why their
mothers and sisters receive them with a burst of emotion, as if their
dead had come back to them from the grave. This interpretation of the
ceremony is confirmed by a curious rite which is observed by the Akikuyu
of British East Africa. Amongst them every boy or girl at or about the
age of ten years has solemnly to pretend to be born again, not in a
moral or religious, but in a physical sense. The mother of the child,
or, if she is dead, some other woman, goes through an actual pantomime
of bringing forth the boy or girl. I will spare you the details of the
pantomime, which is very graphic, and will merely mention that the
bouncing infant squalls like a newborn babe. Now this ceremony of the
new birth was formerly enacted among the Akikuyu at the rite of
circumcision, though the two ceremonies are now kept distinct.[412]
Hence it is not very rash to conjecture that the ceremony performed by
the young Papuans of Finsch Harbour on their return to the village after
undergoing circumcision is merely a way of keeping up the pretence of
being born again and of being therefore as ignorant and helpless as
babes.

[Sidenote: The mock death of the novices as a preliminary to the mock
birth.]

But if the end of the initiation is a mock resurrection, or rather new
birth, as it certainly seems to be, we may infer with some confidence
that the first part of it, namely the act of circumcision, is a mock
death. This is borne out by the explicit statement of a very