How did traditional peoples initiate young people into adulthood?

What was initiation for, in a hunter-gatherer culture? #

To make a full Human Being. All hunter-gatherer cultures had initiation ceremonies, held around adolescence and designed to shock the young person out of childhood thinking and help them step up to become a true Adult. Being an Adult meant far more than taking on adult jobs in the tribe. It meant being connected to your true Soul, knowing your true Human nature, and taking your place on the Earth as an interconnected being, and it was only once a young person had done this that the tribe considered them a fully Human Being.¹

That is why the timing mattered. Children were raised by real Adults who modelled Adulthood, so when adolescence came they knew what they were stepping into, and the rites were there to dismantle the identity built in childhood and grow a new one rooted in Soul.² What the rites were for, and what was lost when they stopped, is in What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?

What did the ceremonies actually involve? #

The best-known detailed accounts come from Aboriginal Australia. The ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, drawing on the nineteenth-century reports of Spencer and Gillen, Roth, Howitt and Mathews, describes the boys’ ceremonies of several peoples of south, south-east and central Australia, hunter-gatherers before colonisation. They could run from about the tenth to the thirtieth year. First came separation from the world of women and children: the novice was secluded in the bush, in a special place or hut, under taboos above all about food. Sooner or later came a final, often violent, separation from his mother, who might weep for him.³

The anthropologist A. W. Howitt wrote of the Kurnai of Gippsland that the past was to be cut off from the boy “by a gulf which he can never re-pass”: he would leave his mother’s side and the games of boyhood and become one of the men. In some peoples the novice was treated as dead for the whole of his novitiate, and put through a long physical and mental weakening, meant to erase the memory of childhood. Then came the positive part, instruction in the law of the tribe, watching sacred ceremonies and hearing the myths, and finally a mark on the body, such as the removal of a tooth, that made him for ever one of the adult men. Where he had been treated as dead, he was brought back to life and taught how to live, but differently from how he had lived as a child.³

That record has to be read with care. The Kurnai initiation ceremony, the Jeraeil, had last been held in 1857, after government restrictions and missionary pressure stopped it; the one Howitt described was held in January 1884 so that he could record it, with many of the people arriving from the Lake Tyers and Ramahyuck missions. Historians of anthropology call it something of a staged revival, held at his request.⁴

Why were the rites so hard? #

To break the hold of childhood. In the account van Gennep gives, the weakening, the seclusion and the treatment of the novice as dead all served one end, to make the boy lose his recollection of his childhood existence before he was taught the new one.⁵ Every rite of passageRite of passage. The deliberate death-and-rebirth (separation → liminal → incorporation, after van Gennep) by which the childhood-built identity is dismantled and a new one, rooted in the Soul, is grown. The lost route to Adulthood. More about this runs this way. In its first stage normality is deliberately disrupted, to shock the initiate into an altered state, and in the middle stage they are taken apart and reformed, like a pupa in a chrysalis, before being welcomed back with a new role and place. See Who was Arnold van Gennep, and what are the three stages of a rite of passage?

The ordeal is not the only way in, though. Finding your Soul is itself an initiation into Adulthood, and the process does not have to be a dramatic one; there are gentler and steadier paths, and they are equally effective.⁶ See Can initiation be recreated today, and what makes a modern rite of passage safe?

Were girls initiated too? #

Yes, and among foragers perhaps especially so. Reviewing studies of hunter-gatherer adolescence, the archaeologist April Nowell notes, after the anthropologists Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, that female initiation ceremonies are typical of foraging societies, and that among foragers adolescence is lived alongside adults and younger children rather than in a peer group, with a strong sense of self and belonging and none of the identity crisis taken for granted in modern teenagers.⁷ Among the !Kung of the Kalahari, in the studies she cites, adolescence was a stretch of life marked by events rather than years: for girls it ran from the first period to the birth of a first child.

Among the Mbendjele BaYaka of the northern Congo forest, hunter-gatherers who also trade and work with farming neighbours, the anthropologist Jerome Lewis describes girls being initiated at their first period into the women’s secret societies, Ngoku and Yele. Ngoku teaches women’s procreative secrets and how to use sexuality to manage men; Yele teaches how women’s ritual activity ‘opens the camp’ for meat and ties up the spirits of game animals so that men can find and kill them. The men’s Ejengi rites re-enact the BaYaka story of an original society of men and of women, renewing in each generation the contract between the two.⁸

How is this different from initiation among farming peoples? #

Very often it is the farming peoples’ rites that get described, and they are not the same thing. Virtually all existing shamanic societies are agricultural, and genuine hunter-gatherer cultures have all but gone, so even animist farming peoples are to some degree affected by domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and Taker thinking.⁹ The anthropologist Victor Turner’s famous account of Mukanda, the boys’ circumcision rite of the Ndembu of Zambia, comes from a people who lived by growing cassava. See Who was Victor Turner, and what are liminality and communitas?

Living farming peoples also show how far such rites can drift from the picture. In Malawi, the researchers Alister Munthali and Eliya Zulu found that only about 43 per cent of girls and 33 per cent of boys had been initiated, far more among the Yao than in the north; that most young people had already gone through the changes of puberty before the rite; and that girls were taught respect, obedience and avoiding sex, whilst boys were often told to prove they were grown up by having sex.¹⁰ Those are records of farming societies under modern pressures, not evidence of how hunter-gatherers initiated their young. See What is the difference between a hunter-gatherer and an agricultural society?

How much do we really know about initiation in the deep past? #

Less than for recent peoples, and the evidence is read in two ways. On one side, Nowell finds no archaeological evidence for initiation ceremonies among Palaeolithic teenagers; the finger-markings in decorated caves were made by too few people at a time to suggest society-wide rites, and heel prints at Tuc d’Audoubert in France, long read as an initiation dance, were reread by Ju/’hoan trackers from the Kalahari as a man and a boy walking on their heels to fetch clay.¹¹

On the other side, Nowell herself thinks it “highly probable” that Palaeolithic peoples marked the passage to adulthood in some way, since recent foragers do, and points out that the likely markers, such as scarring, piercing, tattooing, body painting, dance, trance or vision quests, leave nothing for an archaeologist to find.¹¹ Therapeutic Shamanism reads the record of recent hunter-gatherer peoples as evidence of how humans lived for most of our history, whilst recognising that it comes from peoples already in contact with the wider world. See What was hunter-gatherer life really like?