To continue the quotation from Miss Harrison: "More often the new birth
is stimulated, or imagined, as a death and a resurrection, either of
the boys themselves or of some one else in their presence. Thus at
initiation among some tribes of South-east Australia, when the boys are
assembled an old man dressed in stringy bark-fibre lies down in a
grave. He is covered up lightly with sticks and earth, and the grave is
smoothed over. The buried man holds in his hand a small bush which seems
to be growing from the ground, and other bushes are stuck in the ground
round about. The novices are then brought to the edge of the grave and
a song is sung. Gradually, as the song goes on, the bush held by the
buried man begins to quiver. It moves more and more, and bit by bit the
man himself starts up from the grave."

Strange in our own Baptismal Service and just before the actual
christening we read these words, "Then shall the Priest say: O merciful
God, grant that old Adam in this child may be so BURIED that the new
man may be raised up in him: grant that all carnal affections may die
in him, and that all things belonging to the Spirit may live and grow
in him!" Can we doubt that the Australian medicine-man, standing at the
graveside of the re-arisen old black-fellow, pointed the same moral to
the young initiates as the priest does to-day to those assembled before
him in church--for indeed we know that among savage tribes initiations
have always been before all things the occasions of moral and social
teaching? Can we doubt that he said, in substance if not in actual
words: "As this man has arisen from the grave, so you must also arise
from your old childish life of amusement and self-gratification and,
ENTER INTO the life of the tribe, the life of the Spirit of the tribe."
"In totemistic societies," to quote Miss Harrison again, "and in the
animal secret societies that seem to grow out of them, the novice is
born again as THE SACRED ANIMAL. Thus among the Carrier Indians (1)
when a man wants to become a Lulem or 'Bear,' however cold the season
he tears off his clothes, puts on a bear-skin and dashes into the
woods, where he will stay for three or four days. Every night his
fellow-villagers will go out in search parties to find him. They cry out
Yi! Kelulem (come on, Bear), and he answers with angry growls. Usually
they fail to find him, but he comes back at last himself. He is met, and
conducted to the ceremonial lodge, and there i