“Among the Magwanda and Bapedi peoples of Africa, the master of the initiation addresses the [boys to be initiated] in these words: “Until now, you have been in the darkness of childhood; you were like women and you knew nothing!”
Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation
All premodern or traditional societies have accorded the greatest significance to rites of passage, whose purpose is to initiate boys into manhood. A rite of passage is led by the male elders of the community and it is obligatory for all adolescent boys. A boy who tries to evade a rite of passage, or who fails to complete it, is shunned, ridiculed, and in some cases exiled from the community.
Despite local variations, cross-culturally the stages of a rite of passage are remarkably similar. In this chapter we examine the various stages that constitute a rite of passage. As a warning, some of the stages may appear unnecessarily cruel or violent. However, our ancestors realized that difficult and painful trials are required for a boy to break free from his regressive desires to remain dependent on the mother.
“The woundings that occur during initiations can be rejected as brutal, but I would argue that greater brutality results where there are no “ordeals of meaning”.”
Michael Meade, Introduction to Rites and Symbols of Initiation
Or as the psychologist James Hillman observed:
“Thus we see why our ancestors had such powerful rites of passage. They knew all too well the regressive power of the psyche, the longing for the safety and satiety of the Mother. As great as is the inner pressure, the deep pull back and down into the realm of the Mother, so must a corresponding force emerge to bridge the psyche over the great-in-between. This was the wisdom embodied in tribal rites of passage out of childhood.”
James Hollis, Under Saturn’s Shadow
The first stage of a rite of passage is ”separation from the mother”. Without any warning, and often in the dead of night, the male elders, dressed as gods or demons, “kidnap” the boy from his home and take him to a secret space in the forest or bush. The following day the elders inform the mother that the boy has been devoured by a demonic divinity, and that while there is a chance he will be brought back to life, he will no longer be the same – never again will he be her child. The mother is therefore told to mourn the death of her son. Regarding this stage of separation from the mother, the renowned historian of religion Mircea Eliade writes:
“What we have is a break, sometimes quite a violent break, with the world of childhood – which is at once the maternal and female world and the child’s state of irresponsibility and happiness, of ignorance and asexuality…For the first time [the boys] feel religious fear and terror, for they are told beforehand that they will be captured and killed by divine beings…they are torn from their blissful childhood unconsciousness…The very act of separation from their mothers fills them with forebodings of death – for they are seized by unknown, often masked men, and carried far from their familiar surroundings.”
Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation
In addition to physically separating him from his mother, the male elders guide the boy through symbolic rituals, or public declarations, that signify he is no longer dependent on her. For example, in the tribes of Papua Indonesia the mother is told to lie on the ground and the boy is instructed to walk over her, deliberately stepping on her belly. This act symbolizes the fact that the womb, i.e., the comforts of hearth and home, is a threat to masculine development and to be treated with scorn. In many African tribes, adolescent boys are prohibited from drinking cow’s or goat’s milk – as milk is the food of infancy. Robert Bly recounts a practice of one tribe in Australia where the male elders cut their forearms, drip blood into a bowl and give it to the boy to drink. “Mother’s milk nourished you. Now father’s blood nourishes you”, the elders tell the boy (Robert Bly, as quoted in Hollis Saturn’s Shadow). In his book the Manhood in the Making, David Gilmore explains the symbolic significance of this milk prohibition.
“The milk prohibitions communicate two linked declarations: first, the boy renounces all food dependency on his own mother; second, he renounces the juvenescent wish to seek substitute oral gratification among affines and older women, people whom he must later support through his own economic activities. This double abnegation of maternal nurturing reenacts both ritually and psychodynamically the trauma of weaning, for it conveys a public confirmation that he has renounced the breast voluntarily in favor of delayed gratifications of work. All women will henceforth be treated as receivers rather than givers of food; the boy will no longer need mothering.”
David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making
Following the stage of separation from the mother, the boy proceeds to the second stage of a rite of passage – the stage of suffering. Central to this stage is a ritual wounding. In some cultures, the male elders use a chisel and hammer to knock out one of the boy’s teeth. In other tribes, the boy is forced to sit naked on a mound of fire ants and poisonous plants. In one of the more brutal ritual woundings, which occurs in a tribe of New Guinea, long, sharp, and rigid pieces of grass are thrust up the boy’s nose until blood comes gushing out. The anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, who witnessed this wounding, called it “the single most painful, ritual act and probably close to an authentic physical and psychological trauma” (Gilbert Herdt, Rituals of Manhood).
