ed with mysteries and
initiations. Now mysteries and initiations are things that tend to
dwindle and to lose their characteristic features as civilisation
advances. The rites of baptism and confirmation are not secret and
hidden; they are common to both sexes, they are publicly performed,
and religion and morality of the purest sort blend in these
ceremonies. There are no other initiations or mysteries that
civilised modern man is expected necessarily to pass through. On the
other hand, looking widely at human history, we find mystic rites and
initiations numerous, stringent, severe, and magical in character, in
proportion to the lack of civilisation in those who practise them. The
less the civilisation, the more mysterious and the more cruel are the
rites. The more cruel the rites, the less is the civilisation. The red
hot poker with which Mr. Bouncer terrified Mr. Verdant Green at the
sham masonic rites would have been quite in place, a natural
instrument of probationary torture, in the Freemasonry of Australians,
Mandans, or Hottentots. In the mysteries of Demeter or Bacchus, in the
mysteries of a civilised people, the red-hot poker, or any other
instrument of torture, would have been out of place. But in the Greek
mysteries, just as in those of South Africans, Red Indians, and
Australians, the disgusting practice of bedaubing the neophyte with
dirt and clay was preserved. We have nothing quite like that in modern
initiations. Except at Sparta, Greeks dropped the tortures inflicted
on boys and girls in the initiations superintended by the cruel
Artemis.[16] But Greek mysteries retained the daubing with mud and the
use of the bull-roarer. On the whole, then, and on a general view of
the subject, we prefer to think that the bull-roarer in Greece was a
survival from savage mysteries, not that the bull-roarer in New
Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa is a relic of
civilisation.

Let us next observe a remarkable peculiarity of the _turndun_, or
Australian bull-roarer. The bull-roarer in England is a toy. In
Australia, according to Howitt and Fison,[17] the bull-roarer is
regarded with religious awe. 'When, on lately meeting with two of the
surviving Kurnai, I spoke to them of the turndun, they first looked
cautiously round them to see that no one else was looking, and then
answered me in undertones.' The chief peculiarity in connection with
the turndun is that women may never look upon it. The Chepara tribe