rate to assert that so early an age as
twelve is generally accepted as the age of initiation; the Anglican
Church, for example, usually confirms at the age of fifteen. It is not
age with which we ought to be concerned, but a biological epoch of
psychic evolution. It is unwise to insist on any particular age, because
development takes place within a considerably wide limit of years.

I have spoken of the introduction to religion at puberty as the
initiation into a mystery. The phrase was deliberately chosen, for it
seems to me to be not a metaphor, but the expression of a truth which
has always been understood whenever religion has been a reality and not
a mere convention. Among savages in nearly all parts of the world the
boy or girl at puberty is initiated into the mystery of manhood or of
womanhood, into the duties and the privileges of the adult members of
the tribe. The youth is taken into a solitary place, for a month or
more, he is made to suffer pain and hardship, to learn self-restraint,
he is taught the lore of the tribe as well as the elementary rules of
morality and justice; he is shown the secret things of the tribe and
their meaning and significance, which no stranger may know. He is, in
short, enabled to find his soul, and he emerges from this discipline a
trained and responsible member of his tribe. The girl receives a
corresponding training, suited to her sex, also in solitude, at the
hands of the older women. A clear and full description of a typical
savage initiation into manhood at puberty is presented by Dr. Haddon in
the fifth volume of the _Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological
Expedition to Torres Straits_, and Dr. Haddon makes the comment: "It is
not easy to conceive of more effectual means for a rapid training."

The ideas of remote savages concerning the proper manner of initiating
youth in the religious and other mysteries of life may seem of little
personal assistance to superiorly civilized people like ourselves. But
let us turn, therefore, to the Greeks. They also had preserved the idea
and the practice of initiation into sacred mysteries, though in a
somewhat modified form because religion had ceased to be so intimately
blended with all the activities of life. The Eleusinian and other
mysteries were initiations into sacred knowledge and insight which, as
is now recognized, involved no revelation of obscure secrets, but were
mysteries in the sense that all intimate experiences of the sou