into the world; by his second he is born into his tribe. At his
first birth he belongs to his mother and the women-folk; at his second
he becomes a full-fledged man and passes into the society of the
warriors of his tribe."... "These rites are very various, but they all
point to one moral, that the former things are passed away and that
the new-born man has entered upon a new life. Simplest of all, and most
instructive, is the rite practised by the Kikuyu tribe of British East
Africa, who require that every boy, just before circumcision, must be
born again. The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet; she
pretends to go through all the labour pains, and the boy on being reborn
cries like a babe and is washed." (2)

(1) Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 104.

(2) See also Themis, p. 21.

Let us pause for a moment. An Initiate is of course one who "enters
in." He enters into the Tribe; he enters into the revelation of certain
Mysteries; he becomes an associate of a certain Totem, a certain God; a
member of a new Society, or Church--a church of Mithra, or Dionysus or
Christ. To do any of these things he must be born again; he must die
to the old life; he must pass through ceremonials which symbolize the
change. One of these ceremonials is washing. As the new-born babe is
washed, so must the new-born initiate be washed; and as by primitive
man (and not without reason) BLOOD was considered the most vital and
regenerative of fluids, the very elixir of life, so in earliest times
it was common to wash the initiate with blood. If the initiate had to be
born anew, it would seem reasonable to suppose that he must first die.
So, not unfrequently, he was wounded, or scourged, and baptized with his
own blood, or, in cases, one of the candidates was really killed and his
blood used as a substitute for the blood of the others. No doubt HUMAN
sacrifice attended the earliest initiations. But later it was sufficient
to be half-drowned in the blood of a Bull as in the Mithra cult, (1)
or 'washed in the blood of the Lamb' as in the Christian phraseology.
Finally, with a growing sense of decency and aesthetic perception
among the various peoples, washing with pure water came in the
initiation-ceremonies to take the place of blood; and our baptismal
service has reduced the ceremony to a mere sprinkling with water. (2)

(1) See ch. iii.

(2) For the virtue supposed to reside in blood see Westermarck's
Moral Ideas, Ch. 46.