BKRiiY — The Sierra Leone Ganvihals. 35 



and pushed them further towards the coast. The daily hfe is haunted by 

 superstition and governed by fetish, and they are banded into numerous 

 societies which, by fear and intimidation, regulate the daily life of man and 

 woman alike. 



Like all other primitive people, the tribes of "West Africa have their 

 ceremonies on initiation, and, as Mr. Andrew Lang, in his "Origins of Eeligion" 

 (page 17), says : — " Looking widely at human history, we find mystic rites and 

 initiations, numerous, stringent, severe, and magical in character, in proportion 

 to the lack of civilization in those who practise them. The less the ciAilization 

 the more mysterious and the more cruel are the rites." 



Of these initiatory rites, the more important happen at the age of puberty, 

 with the object of removing the youth, who up to that time had been under 

 the care of his mother, from the association of the women and children, and 

 introducing him into the society of the men, and to his duties as a warrior 

 and a man of the tribe. Initiation ceremonies go back to an antiquity that is 

 unknown, and their origin appears untraceable. Tlie mysteries are always 

 jealously guai'ded from the uninitiated, contain the code of morality developed 

 by the people, and the religious ideas to which they have attained. "We find 

 puberty rites associated with animism, naturalism, and ancestor-worship. In 

 West Africa they are associated also with fetishism and with Islamism. As 

 a people becomes more civilized the initiation rites assume a more spiritual 

 form, such as those of Egypt, the worship of ilythra, and the Eleusinian 

 mysteries, and the mysteries of Demeter and Bacchus ; at the same time 

 the language by which the ritual is expressed becomes either hidden or is 

 veiled in symbols and allegory.' 



Almost universally initiation rites include a mimic representation of the 

 death and resurrection of the novice. The Susus say that tlie boys are 

 killed, and that they remain dead for some days : on the Congo, they are 

 believed to die and come to life again. The new life to which the youth 

 awakes after initiation is one utterly forgetful of the child-life, which is 

 dead, and falls off from the initiate with his hair, or as his flesh wastes, 

 or is washed away with the white clay with which (he novice has been 

 bedaubed as a sign of mourning, and to hide him from the malignant ghosts 

 around at the critical time the soul is entering his body. In the Dionysiac 

 mysteries the performers were painted all over with white clay or gypsum, 

 so that they might not be recognized. The object of the initiation ceremony 

 seems to be to bring the initiates as closely as possible to the state of the 

 wandering spirits, and in touch with the great amorphous powers. To 



'For classical parallels see Mr. Andrew I,ang's essay on " The Bull-Roarer" in '• The Oiigins 

 of Religion," and the " Metamorphoses of Apuleius," Book si, pp. 192 et snq. 



