The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c31.s5.27

v2.c31.s5.27

In other lands and among other peoples strange puberty or initiation rites have been recorded, many of them accompanied by violent physical tortures and applied both to boys and to girls, of which Sparta in historical times still preserved relics, and which are still practised widely among modern savages. The idea of a second birth has often been connected in the minds of the performers of these rites with the practices which they follow and carried to the logical extreme of requiring the newly born people to start life at the infant stage,² to pretend that they have forgotten how to speak, or to feed themselves. Severe scourgings, the knocking out of teeth, circumcision, the pouring over the initiated of kindred blood and other agreeable absurdities are recorded of such tribes, and it is natural of course to see in the Vedic rite a deliberate and reasoning reduction of these practices to sensible limits. There must be a certain amount of truth in this, but it is essential to note that we have no evidence to what extent the more violent of these customs ever prevailed among the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans.¹ The customs in question agree in the main only in their infinite variety, and it would be impossible to establish any form for initiation. In some cases doubtless the practices often were changed and assumed new forms: the drastic treatment of the Spartan boys may have been seriously intensified with a definite view to discipline character, though the origin may have been merely the driving away of evil influences at a critical time of youth, the appearance of puberty: in the case of girls, the Vedic Indians, in accordance with their usual practice as regards women, ignored entirely their claim to be initiated, and therefore prescribed no form of ritual at all for them.