ON FEMALE INITIATIONS, ADOLESCENT WANDERING & THE RENEWAL OF THE COSMOS

I’ve recently had the pleasure of finishing Bruce Lincoln’s book Emerging from the Chrysalis, Rituals of Women’s Initiation. The book was originally written in 1981, then updated in 1990 where he offers a much more political reading of women’s initiations and actively seeks to undercut his previous conclusions.

I picked up the book because there’s so little systematic study of female initiations and because I’ve always been a little skittish about drawing conclusions from male initiations and applying them to both sexes.

One of those conclusions is that initiation involves wandering. This seems right to us, because our contemporary adolescents wander. Most of them leave home and we encourage them, male and female alike, to travel, go away for college, have different experiences.

There’s a ton of anthropological literature about adolescent male wanderings, perhaps the most famous of which are the walkabouts of Aboriginal Australians but the female initiations that Lincoln considers involve no physical wandering at all. The girls all stay within their villages, and three of the four examples are actually within the huts in which they previously lived (and to which they will return). While his sample size is admittedly small, Lincoln claims that he has read a great deal of ethnographic accounts and he can’t point to any examples where the girls actually physically wander.

Lincoln therefore suggests that instead of the rhythm of separation, liminality and reincorporation which are the terms that have been routinely used since Van Gennep’s seminal book The Rites of Passage, we use the terms “enclosure, metamorphosis and emergence.” These terms actually fit the ethnographic data better because the initiand is put into an enclosed place in the village or home, spends time in the enclosure during which important ritual action takes place and then emerges as a woman. It’s very analogous to the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and then emerging as a butterfly through a process called metamorphosis where the cells of the caterpillar become the cells of a butterfly inside the chrysalis.

So what happens during this period of metamorphosis, according to Lincoln? The highlight it seems to me is the identification with a mythic heroine and a cosmic journey that serves to renew the cosmos. In most of the female initiations that Lincoln describes the initiand imitates the actions of mythical heroine who brings order to the cosmos. The Navajo girl becomes Changing Woman, the mythical heroine who brings corn and makes the seasons change. The Tukuna girls from the Amazon imitate Ariana and her victory over the demons—and Ariana is also the bringer of Corn. The scarification of the girls of the Tiv, a people from Cameroon in Africa identifies her with cosmic processes. Thus these initiations renew the cosmos.

Now Lincoln as a modern westerner caught up in the myth of science, doesn’t quite know what to make of this claim of renewing the cosmos. Instead he turns to the social political impact of the rituals where he rightly claims that they serve to make the girl a more obedient woman who will uphold a sexist status quo. As he says “women’s initiation offers a religious compensation for a sociopolitical deprivation. Or, to put it differently still, it is an opiate for an oppressed class.” (p.105). Boys’ initiation rituals are different than girls’ initiation rituals because boys mature into men who have sociopolitical power, and girls mature into women who don’t.

That’s true enough, but what does it tell us? That patriarchy is bad in tribal societies, that its horrors aren’t limited to global capitalism? Do we really need to study women’s initiation rituals from tribes we’ve never heard of to conclude that patriarchy is bad?

I’m much more interested in the idea of having initiation of both genders recapitulate or build on cultural heroes and heroines to renew the cosmos. Our world is a mess and one part of the solution is to have people who are spiritually mature. The core purpose of all these initiation rites is societal and psychological maturity. Some were more successful than others in inculcating spiritual maturity and some where more akin to the weak sauce of B’nai Mitzvah in our contemporary Jewish world. There are rituals that involve longer and more intense periods of study and practice, and some like the scarification of the Tiv that basically sounds like an appointment at a beauty parlor with no ritual at all surrounding it. Tellingly, the Tiv claim it's not a ritual at all.

We in our contemporary world need to find ways to generate spiritually mature adults. We need to find ways to align ourselves with the cosmic process of creation and destruction and find the balance that is possible. We need to grasp the core insight that it is part of the human task to participate in the renewal of the cosmos by telling the stories of our Gods and Goddesses, our cultural heroes and heroines.