Chapter 71 Rituals of Death and Resurrection

A religious ritual is so well illustrated by the idea of ​​totemism that, so far as I know, there is no better account than it.In many uncivilized barbaric clans, especially those who practiced the totem system, when the children reached puberty, they had to undergo certain rites of passage according to custom. One of the most common practices was to pretend to kill the puberty children and raised him up again.If it is said that this is done to transfer the soul of the child into its totem, then the ritual can be understood.Because if you want to call the soul of the child out of the body, it is natural to think of killing the child, or at least making the child unconscious (primitives regard unconsciousness as the same as death and cannot distinguish it).The child woke up after extreme fainting, which can be said to be the gradual recovery of the body, but primitive people interpreted it as the infusion of new life from the child's totem.Therefore, the essence of these coming-of-age rites, in terms of their feigned death and resurrection, can be said to be rituals for people to exchange lives with their totems.The primitive people's belief in such an exchange of souls obviously comes from the Basque [the ancient inhabitants of the western Pyrenees in Europe and the three provinces in northern Spain. ] Hunter's Tale.The story goes that a Basque hunter claimed to be killed by a bear, the bear's soul entered the hunter's body, the bear's body died, and the hunter became the bear.The hunter in this story, who came back from the dead and turned into a bear, is the exact version of the theory in question here: Killing and bringing back the child at the bar mitzvah of the teenage child.The child dies as a human being and comes back to life as an animal; the animal's soul enters the child, and the child's soul enters the animal's body.He is therefore justly justified in calling himself what his totem is, as a bear, a wolf, etc.; the souls of himself and his loved ones.

Another example of the false death and resurrection in this rite of initiation is as follows.In the Wenji or Wenjibang tribe of New South Wales, young adults undergo a secret ritual when they come of age, and no outsider is allowed to watch it.Part of the ritual involves knocking out a tooth of the young man undergoing the ritual and giving him a new name to signify that the young man has grown up.There is a tool called "bull roar" when knocking teeth. A piece of flat wood with serrated edges is tied to one end of the rope. When the wheel is turned, it makes a loud roar.Those who have not undergone this ritual are not allowed to see this tool.Women are not allowed to watch this ceremony, offenders are punished by death.According to reports, every youth who undergoes this ritual will be taken to a distance by a mysterious monster named Thuremlin (commonly known as Daramulun) to kill them, and even cut them into pieces, and then make them Revive and knock out a tooth.It is said that the tribal people are convinced of Du Renlin's power and have no doubts.

Darling River [in southeastern Australia, flowing southwest through the Murray River into the Indian Ocean. ] The Walaroi people in the upper reaches say that in this coming-of-age ceremony, ghosts and gods will kill the child to be gifted, and bring him back to life to become a man.The natives of the lower Lachlan River and the Murray River Valley all believe that Tulumalon (that is, Dalamoren) killed and resurrected the young man for ceremonies.Women and children of the Ammatjela tribe in central Australia believe that a spirit named Twanylica kills and revives young men during initiation ceremonies.The rite of initiation of the youth in this tribe, like that practiced in other tribes in central Australia, consists of circumcision and the underside of the glans; Staff, and taught him that his soul has been connected with distant ancestors.After the ceremony, the young man retreats to the bushes to recuperate and cut his wounds. During this period, he must rotate the "bull roar", otherwise the gods in the sky will come down to snatch him away.Gulf of Carpentaria [A bay in the Arafula Sea on the northern coast of Australia. ] The women and children of the Bimbinga tribe on both sides of the Taiwan Strait thought that the sound of the "bull roar" in the coming-of-age ceremony was made by a spirit named Kata Galina.This spirit lived in the ant hill, and came to the ceremony of coming of age to eat the youth who held the ceremony of coming of age, and then revived the youth.Likewise, their neighbors, the women of the Anura tribe, imagined that the buzzing noise of the "bull roar" was made by a spirit called Gnabaya, who devoured the gifted child and spat it out again, and the child became Adults who have had their coming-of-age ceremony.Among the tribes along the coast of southern New South Wales, the Coastal Mullin's youth rite of passage can be regarded as typical.During the ceremonial ceremony, all recipients are allowed to see a dramatic picture exhibition of the resurrection of the dead.One person who witnessed the ritual described it as follows: A man lay wrapped in a tanned leather boujo makeup and lay in a grave, thinly covered with twigs and earth.He holds a small tree in his hand, which seems to be about to grow in the graveyard.There are also many small trees inserted beside the tomb to add to the atmosphere.Then all the recipients were carried to the tomb, and a long line of men dressed in tannic acid leather cloth also came to the cemetery. They represented a group of witch doctors, led by two elders, who came to offer sacrifices and sacrifices. Witch doctor brothers here.While reciting mantras towards Daramulun, they filed in a single file, passing through cliffs and trees to the tomb in this open space, and stopped opposite the recipient.The two elderly witch doctors stood behind, and the rest of the witch doctors sang and danced until the small tree in the hand of the pretended dead man in the tomb began to tremble."Look!" they said to the recipient, pointing to the trembling leaves.The recipients all looked at the small tree growing from the tomb, the small tree trembled even more, and fell to the ground after being shaken violently.Amidst the wild dancing of witch doctors and the sound of Buddhist chant, the man pretending to be dead kicked away the branches and soil pressing on his body, jumped up and performed a witch dance in the tomb, spitting out witch medicine, hypothesized to be Dalamor Ren himself gave it to him.

Some tribes in northern New Guinea—the Yabin, Bukaoya, Kay, and Tami—like some clans in Australia, require their male members to be circumcised before they can enter the ranks of men.Its tribal rite of passage also centered on circumcision, and it was also believed that a monster swallowed the recipient youth and then spit it out.The sound of "bull roar" used in the ceremony is also believed to be made by monsters.These New Guinea clans not only enforced this belief on the minds of women and children, but they performed it in dramatic form during the actual ceremony of initiation, which neither women nor uninitiated males were allowed to observe.For this reason, they built a shed about 100 feet long in a remote place in the woods or in a village, shaped like a monster, with one end slightly higher to represent the monster's head, and the other end gradually dwarfed.Dig up a betel nut tree by its roots, as the back of the monster, and the fluffy roots of the tree as the monster's hair.The artists of this clan also decorated the tall end of the long shed with two wide eyes and a wide open mouth, making the whole shed look like a monster.The young men who were to undergo the rite of initiation, after saying goodbye to their mothers and female relatives (who believed or pretended to believe that monsters were going to devour their relatives), were sent transfixed with horror before this imposing hut, which The huge monster roared sullenly (actually it was just the buzzing sound of the "bull roar" made by a person hiding in the monster's belly).The specific process of the monster devouring the recipient varies in different ways.In the Tami tribe, the recipients line up and pass in front of a row of men holding bull roars on their heads, while the Kai people more vividly let the recipients walk under a high shelf, and a person stands on the shelf, posing The posture of devouring people is actually just swallowing a sip of water when every trembling young man walks under his feet.If a piglet is presented to the man in time, the monster can forgive the young man and spit him out in time.The person playing the role of the monster accepts the gift on behalf of the monster, and the sound of gurgling water can be heard immediately, and the saliva just swallowed is sprayed on the body of the young man who offered the gift.This means that the young man has been released from the belly of the monster.But he had to go through the more painful and dangerous circumcision immediately.This excision is interpreted as the wound left when the monster spit it out.When the circumcision was performed, someone danced the "bull roar", making a thunderous sound, indicating that it was the roar of the terrible monster devouring the young man.

Sometimes a young child dies of the mutilation, and is buried quietly in the deep woods, and tells the mourning mother that the monster had a pig's belly and a big belly, and that her child unfortunately fell into the pig's belly and couldn't spit it out.After the circumcision, young men must be isolated for several months and must not touch women, or even see women.They lived in the long shed that represented the belly of the monster.At last, they returned to the village with dignity in a ceremony of welcome as ceremonial adults, and the women of the tribe received them with tears of joy and sobs, as if they had been raised from the grave.At first, these young people closed their eyes tightly, sometimes even covered their eyes with plaster, pretending not to understand what the elders told them.Gradually they recovered, as if awakened from a coma.Take a bath the next day, wash off the chalk on your body, and the whole process of coming-of-age ceremony is over.

It is notable that all those clans of New Guinea used the term "monster" which devoured the circumcised young man during the circumcision, and that the harmless sound of the wooden "bull roar" was the monster's roar. It's the same word.It is particularly worth noting that the words "bull roar" and monster spoken in three of the four languages ​​also mean ghosts or ghosts of dead people.In that fourth language, the language of the Kai, another meaning of the word monster is "grandfather."It can be seen that the monsters in the coming-of-age ceremony are regarded as powerful ghosts or ancestral gods, and the "bull roar" is the material embodiment of ghosts or gods.This explains why the artifact was kept absolutely secret from the sight of women.When not in use, the "Bull Roar" is stored in the men's club room, and women are not allowed to enter. They and all people who have not received the rite of passage are not allowed to peek at the "Bull Roar", and offenders will be sentenced to death.The Papuan people on the southern coast of the Netherlands New Guinea, or the Tugri tribe or the Kaya Yaya tribe, call the "bull roar" the sosom, which is a mysterious monster. All come.At this time, the Kaya people hold festivals for it, rotate the "bull roar" and dedicate the boys to it, and it sympathetically revives the children.

There are parts of Viti Levu, the largest island in the Fiji archipelago, where the drama of death and resurrection is always ceremoniously performed in front of rites of passage for young people.In a hallowed enclosure are displayed a row of dead or seemingly dying men lying on the ground, disemboweled and entrails drained, soaked in pools of blood.The high priest stopped drinking, and those people who had suspended animation jumped up and ran to the river to wash off their blood and borrowed pig internal organs, and then walked back to the sacred paddock full of energy. Wearing a wreath, shaking his body according to the solemn music rhythm, he came to stand before the recipient.This is how the drama of death and resurrection in the rites of initiation of youth is performed.

There is an island of Rook between New Guinea and New Britain. The natives on the island have such a festival. The content of the activity is: two men wear wooden masks on their heads, dance and walk around the whole village, All the men followed.They demanded the handing over of young children who were circumcised but had not yet been devoured by the Marsaba (the demon).Trembling with fright, the children shrieked and slipped under the crotch of the man in disguise.Then the group went around the village again, declaring that the masaba had devoured the child and would not spit it out unless a gift of pigs and taro was offered.So all the residents of the village gave gifts according to their own strength, and finally all the residents of the village ate these things together in the name of Masaba.Seram [Indonesian territory, an island in the Moluccas. ] Boys in the West were accepted as members of the Kakian association when they reached puberty.Modern writers recognize the Society as primarily a political society against foreign occupation, but in fact its purposes were purely religious and social, although its priests may occasionally have used their authoritative influence to achieve certain political ends.This society is but one of those primitive religious organizations which are widely prevalent, and one of its chief objects is to hold rites of initiation for the young.In recent years the true nature of the association has been officially recognized by the famous Dutch ethnographer Liedl.The clubhouse of the Kakien Society is a rectangular wooden shed. It lives in the deepest part of the forest where the trees are densest and most shaded.Every village has a clubhouse like this.When the children grow up to receive the coming-of-age ceremony, they have to be blindfolded and led to the club by two men arm in arm, and their parents and relatives also follow.Each recipient has two men as guardians to take care of them during the ceremony.When all the people gathered in front of the shed, the high priest began to summon demons loudly.In an instant, sharp and harsh noises were heard in the shed.In fact, someone secretly entered the shed through the back door to hide in advance. At this time, the bamboo trumpet was blown. The women and children didn't know it. They thought it was the voice of the devil and were very frightened.So the priest led the way into the shed, followed by the children receiving the ceremony, only one at a time.Every time the child entered the depths of the shed, there was a dull chopping sound outside the shed, a terrible cry, and then a bloody knife or spear was thrown from the roof of the shed.This means that the devil has cut off the child's head and taken the child to another world to be transformed and resurrected.When the mothers saw the bloody knife, they cried out that the demon had killed their sons.There are places where young children are told to enter a shed through an entrance in the shape of an alligator's beak or a cassowary's beak, and say that demons have devoured them.The children would spend five or nine days in the shed, sitting in the dark listening to the sound of bamboo trumpets and the occasional sound of muskets and swords.He takes a bath every day and smears a layer of yellow dye on his face and body. It looks as if he has been swallowed by a demon.During this period, one or two crosses were stabbed on each person's chest or arm.When he was not sleeping, he had to sit with his knees bent and was not allowed to move.The chief took the trumpet and asked the children to sit in a row with their legs crossed and their hands stretched forward. Then he spoke the trumpet to each child's palm. The tone was very strange, like the voice of a ghost.He warned these children to abide by the rules of the Kajien Society and not to disclose what happened here, otherwise they would be punished and executed.In addition, children are taught to be kind to their blood relatives, and they are also told about the traditions and secrets of the tribe.

During this period, the children's mothers and sisters returned home to cry and mourn.A day or two later, the child's guardian returned to the village to announce the good news: thanks to the intercession of the priest, the devil had returned the child's life. The messenger was covered in mud and fainted, like a messenger who had just returned from the underworld.Before the children left the Kakien meeting place, the priest gave each of them a wooden staff with rooster or cassowary feathers inserted at both ends, indicating that it was given by the devil when he restored their lives, as he had come. A sign of the spirit world.The young children staggered home, walked in with their faces backwards or through the back door, and seemed to have forgotten how to walk.The family served him food on a plate, but he turned the plate upside down and held it.He can't speak, wants something, only gestures.All this indicates that he has not fully recovered from the influence of demons or spirits.His guardians have to teach him the movements of life as if he were a newborn child.In addition, children who left the Kakien Club were warned not to eat certain kinds of fruits for one year, that is, before the next ceremony, and not to be groomed by their mother or sister for twenty or thirty days. hair, and when the twenty or thirty days had expired the high priest took them to a remote place in the woods and cut off a lock of hair from the top of each of their heads.After this series of coming-of-age ceremonies, these children are considered adults and can get married.It is scandalous if someone gets married without a bar mitzvah.

In the Lower Congo region there is a guild or secret society called Ndebo, whose members still practice the old custom of feigning death and resurrection. "The practice of Ndebo's coming-of-age ceremony is that the doctor who performs the operation makes a person pretend to faint and carry him to a walled place outside the city. This is called 'Dying Ndebo'. Others followed suit, They are generally children and girls, more young men and women. They are considered dead, and their parents and friends bring them food. After a period of time (three months to three years according to custom) ), and arranged for the doctor to bring them back to life...First pay the doctor's fee, and then save enough money (goods) for a banquet, then the people in Ndebo can be brought back to life. At first, these people pretended not to know each other Anyone and anything, not even food, has to be done by their friends. They demand all the good things from the rites of passage, and if they don't give them, they beat and even strangle or kill death. Although this is not punished, because people think they are not yet sensible. Sometimes they continue to pretend to be confused and talk nonsense, as if they just returned from the underworld. From then on they have another name, especially for those who passed through the 'ndebo death. ' by the well-known name ... we have heard this custom far up the Congo and in the vicinity of the river."

The essence of these rituals seems to be to kill the human body of the recipient, and when he comes back to life, it will be replaced by the life of an animal, if not his patron saint, at least an animal with which he has a very close relationship.The reader will also remember that the Guatemalan Indians bound their lives to that of an animal in which they were able to make themselves appear.It is not unreasonable, therefore, to speculate that the Indians of British Columbia might equally have imagined their lives to be intimately bound up with those of the animals they imitated in their costumes.At least, if this is not one of the beliefs of the Colombian Indians today, it must have been in their ancestors in the past, and hence the ceremonies of the various totem clans and secret societies.Although there are differences in the manner in which members of these two societies and societies undergo ceremonies (i.e. a person is born into the totem clan to which he belongs and grows up to be inducted as a member of another secret society), they are of the same kind , have their roots in the same type of thought, there can be no doubt.The idea, if I am not mistaken, is to establish a sympathetic relationship with an animal, a spirit, or other powerful divine being, so that a man may deposit his soul or parts of his soul safely in the The other party, and can obtain magical power from the other party. Therefore, on the basis of this theory, wherever totemism is found, and places where it is pretended to be killed to receive the rite of passage and then resurrected, there may be or have been not only the soul permanently stored in something outside the body — in animals, plants, or otherwise — and the intention to actually do so.If you want to ask, why do they keep their souls outside their bodies?The answer can only be: like the giants and monsters in fairy tales, they think it is safer to keep it on their own, just like keeping money in the bank instead of carrying it with them.We have observed that in times of crisis they often transfer their lives or souls to some safe place to hide them, and to retrieve them when the danger is over.But customs such as the totem system do not only do it in times of special crisis. Their system or practice is that everyone, at least every man, must give his life or soul to him at a certain age. Transfer and storage in vitro, usually at the beginning of puberty for this transfer.This fact shows that the particular danger which the totem system, or systems like it, seek to prevent, is that which they think will arise only at sexual maturity, and which in fact they think will occur between the sexes. relationship dangers.We can easily enumerate a long list of facts which prove that in the minds of savage gentes sexual relations have always been associated with many serious disasters.But the exact nature of the catastrophe they dreaded is still unclear.We hope that in the near future there will be a more accurate understanding of the way of thinking of primitive people, which can reveal the most important core secret of primitive society, and thus provide clues for understanding not only the totem system but also the origin of the marriage system.