month or more, he is made to suffer pain and hardship, to learn self-restraint, he is taught the lore of the tribe as well as the elementary rules of morality and justice; he is shown the secret things of the tribe and their meaning and significance, which no stranger may know. He is, in short, enabled to find his soul, and he emerges from this discipline a trained and responsible member of his tribe. The girl receives a corresponding training, suited to her sex, also in solitude, at the hands of the older women. A clear and full description of a typical savage initiation into manhood at puberty is presented by Dr. Haddon in the fifth volume of the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, and Dr. Haddon makes the comment: "It is not easy to conceive of more effectual means for a rapid training."
The ideas of remote savages concerning the proper manner of initiating youth in the religious and other mysteries of life may seem of little personal assistance to superiorly civilized people like ourselves. But let us turn, therefore, to the Greeks. They also had preserved the idea and the practice of initiation into sacred mysteries, though in a somewhat modified form because religion had ceased to be so intimately blended with all the activities of life. The Eleusinian and other mysteries were initiations into sacred knowledge and insight which, as is now recognized, involved no revelation of
obscure secrets, but were mysteries in the sense that all intimate experiences of the soul, the experiences of love quite as much as those of religion, are mysteries, not to be lightly or publicly spoken of. In that feeling the Greek was at one with the Papuan, and it is interesting to observe that the procedure of initiation into the Greek mysteries, as described by Theon of Smyrna and other writers, followed the same course as the pubertal initiations of savages; there was the same preliminary purification by water, the same element of doctrinal teaching, the same ceremonial and symbolic rubbing with sand or charcoal or clay, the same conclusion in a joyous feast, even the same custom of wearing wreaths.