n company with the rest
of the Bears dances solemnly his first appearance. Disappearance and
reappearance is as common a rite in initiation as stimulated killing and
resurrection, and has the same object. Both are rites of transition,
of passing from one to another." In the Christian ceremonies the boy or
girl puts away childish things and puts on the new man, but instead
of putting on a bear-skin he puts on Christ. There is not so much
difference as may appear on the surface. To be identified with your
Totem is to be identified with the sacred being who watches over your
tribe, who has given his life for your tribe; it is to be born again,
to be washed not only with water but with the Holy Spirit of all your
fellows. To be baptized into Christ ought to mean to be regenerated
in the Holy Spirit of all humanity; and no doubt in cases it does mean
this, but too often unfortunately it has only amounted to a pretence of
religious sanction given to the meanest and bitterest quarrels of the
Churches and the States.

(1) Golden Bough, Section 2, III, p. 438.

This idea of a New Birth at initiation explains the prevalent pagan
custom of subjecting the initiates to serious ordeals, often painful and
even dangerous. If one is to be born again, obviously one must be ready
to face death; the one thing cannot be without the other. One must be
able to endure pain, like the Red Indian braves; to go long periods
fasting and without food or drink, like the choupan among the Western
Inoits--who, wanders for whole nights over the ice-fields under the
moon, scantily clothed and braving the intense cold; to overcome the
very fear of death and danger, like the Australian novices who, at first
terrified by the sound of the bull-roarer and threats of fire and the
knife, learn finally to cast their fears away. (1) By so doing one
puts off the old childish things, and qualifies oneself by firmness
and courage to become a worthy member of the society into which one
is called. (2) The rules of social life are taught--the duty to one's
tribe, and to oneself, truth-speaking, defence of women and children,
the care of cattle, the meaning of sex and marriage, and even the
mysteries of such religious ideas and rudimentary science as the tribe
possesses. And by so doing one really enters into a new life. Things of
the spiritual world begin to dawn. Julius Firmicus, in describing
the mysteries of the resurrection of Osiris, (3) says that when the
wo