children for the tribe, and the work of killing the tribe's enemies in
battle.

The classification of people according to their age is apt to be sharp
and vivid in primitive communities. We, for example, think of an old man
as a kind of man, and an old woman as a kind of woman; but in primitive
peoples as soon as a man and woman cease to be able to perform his and
her due tribal functions they cease to be men and women, +andres+ and
+gynaikes+: the ex-man becomes a +geron+; the ex-woman a +graus+.[31:2]
We distinguish between 'boy' and 'man', between 'girl' and 'woman'; but
apart from the various words for baby, Attic Greek would have four sharp
divisions, +pais+, +ephebos+, +aner+, +geron+.[31:3] In Sparta the
divisions are still sharper and more numerous, centring in the great
initiation ceremonies of the Iranes, or full-grown youths, to the
goddess called Orthia or Bortheia.[32:1] These initiation ceremonies are
called Teletai, 'completions': they mark the great 'rite of transition'
from the immature, charming, but half useless thing which we call boy or
girl, to the +teleios aner+, the full member of the tribe as fighter or
counsellor, or to the +teleia gyne+, the full wife and mother. This
whole subject of Greek initiation ceremonies calls pressingly for more
investigation. It is only in the last few years that we have obtained
the material for understanding them, and the whole mass of the evidence
needs re-treatment. For one instance, it is clear that a great number of
rites which were formerly explained as remnants of human sacrifice are
simply ceremonies of initiation.[32:2]

At the great spring Dromenon the tribe and the growing earth were
renovated together: the earth arises afresh from her dead seeds, the
tribe from its dead ancestors; and the whole process, charged as it is
with the emotion of pressing human desire, projects its anthropomorphic
god or daemon. A vegetation-spirit we call him, very inadequately; he is
a divine Kouros, a Year-Daemon, a spirit that in the first stage is
living, then dies with each year, then thirdly rises again from the
dead, raising the whole dead world with him--the Greeks called him in
this phase 'the Third One', or the 'Saviour'. The renovation ceremonies
were accompanied by a casting off of the old year, the old garments, and
everything that is polluted by the infection of death. And not only of
death; but clearly I think, in spite of the protests of some Hellenists,
of gu