Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

xi] The Hybristika as Rite de Passage 507
The rites of puberty, the rites of marriage, are, like all other
primitive rites, rites de passage :
their object is to afford a
safe passage in the perilous transit from one age or condition to
another. Man feels, though he does not yet know, that life is
change, and change is beset with dangers. The first crisis of life is
the change of puberty, from boyhood to manhood. Manhood, among
primitive peoples, seems to be envisaged as ceasing to be a woman
the notion is quite natural. Man is born of woman, reared of
woman. When he passes to manhood, he ceases to be a womanthing
1 and begins to exercise functions other and alien. That
moment is one naturally of extreme peril ; he at once emphasizes
and disguises it. He wears woman's clothes. The same applies
at marriage.
The focus of attention at puberty and in marriage is on sex.
The rite de passage is from one sex to another. Hence the change
of clothes. But what is effective and salutary for one crisis may
be effective and salutary for another. Hence the fact, perplexing
at first, that at mourning for death—another rite de passage—the
Lycians changed clothes with the opposite sex. In fact the
ceremony of change of clothes might easily come to be observed
whenever it was desirable to ' change the luck.' Among the
Nandi
Once every .seven-and-a-half years, some say four years after the circumcision
festival, the Saket-ap-eito ceremony takes place. The country is
handed over from one age to another. At the conclusion of the ceremonies,
the men of the preceding age take off their warriors' garments and put on
those of old age. The defence and well-being of the community are thereby
handed over to their successors.
Here the rite de passage is not from sex to sex but from age to
age. The general characteristics of each periodic festival, such as
the Carnival, the Saturnalia, are always the same, a complete
upset of the old order, a period of licence and mutual hilarity,
and then the institution of the new. As Mr Halliday points
out, the last survival is the servants' ball of the old-fashioned
country Christmas.
Behind the Hybristika and many another primitive Greek rite
there lies a rite of initiation, the rite of the making of a Kouros.
When tribal conditions are broken up, the family takes the place
1 See supra, p. 36.
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