though
invisibly, to the body of the sufferer.[155] The pain inflicted on the
person beaten was no more the object of the beating than it is of a
surgical operation with us; it was a necessary accident, that was all.
In later times such customs were interpreted otherwise, and the pain,
from being an accident, became the prime object of the ceremony, which
was now regarded either as a test of endurance imposed upon persons at
critical epochs of life, or as a mortification of the flesh well
pleasing to the god. But asceticism, under any shape or form, is never
primitive. The savage, it is true, in certain circumstances will
voluntarily subject himself to pains and privations which appear to us
wholly needless; but he never acts thus unless he believes that some
solid temporal advantage is to be gained by so doing. Pain for the sake
of pain, whether as a moral discipline in this life or as a means of
winning a glorious immortality hereafter, is not an object which he sets
himself deliberately to pursue.

[This explanation confirmed with reference to the beating of girls at
puberty among the South American Indians; treatment of a girl at puberty
among the Banivas of the Orinoco; symptoms of puberty in a girl regarded
as wounds inflicted by a demon.]

If this view is correct, we can understand why so many Indian tribes of
South America compel the youth of both sexes to submit to these painful
and sometimes fatal ordeals. They imagine that in this way they rid the
young folk of certain evils inherent in youth, especially at the
critical age of puberty; and when they picture to themselves the evils
in a personal form as dangerous spirits or demons, the ceremony of their
expulsion may in the strict sense be termed an exorcism. This certainly
appears to be the interpretation which the Banivas of the Orinoco put
upon the cruel scourgings which they inflict on girls at puberty. At her
first menstruation a Baniva girl must pass several days and nights in
her hammock, almost motionless and getting nothing to eat and drink but
water and a little manioc. While she lies there, the suitors for her
hand apply to her father, and he who can afford to give most for her or
can prove himself the best man, is promised the damsel in marriage. The
fast over, some old men enter the hut, bandage the girl's eyes, cover
her head with a bonnet of which the fringes fall on her shoulders, and
then lead her forth and tie her to a post set up in an open