Rites of Initiation

Something human culture used to do well, but doesn't do well anymore, are rites of initiation by virtue of which children at about the time of puberty are ushered into adulthood.

Mythology guru Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth about the need for puberty rites (p. 8):

Moyers: Society has provided [young people] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

Campbell: That's exactly it. That's the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don't have your little baby body anymore, you're something else entirely.

(You can read more from the book in this MySpace blog entry; scroll down about halfway for this quote. Or, click here to search inside the book; enter "initiation" in the search field.)

Though I am not Jewish, I am, by Campbell's mention of circumcisions, put in mind of the Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah ceremony at which a 12-year-old girl or 13-year-old boy participates for the first time as an adult in the regular Sabbath service. In today's Judaism it has become a big deal, not unlike a combination of the First Holy Communion and Confirmation sacraments in the Catholic Church, but bigger still.

Jewish boys (but not girls) are ritually circumcised, not at puberty, but within a few days after birth.

Possibly (see this Wikipedia article) male circumcision originated as a rite of passage marking a boy's entrance into adulthood, though other intents have been cited as well. Campbell seems to favor the "rite of passage" interpretation. He also mentions "scarifications," the imposition of scars on the skin to signify the passage into adulthood. Modern civilization toned down the rites of passage such that by the time of Campbell's youth in some 100 years ago, the conferring of the right to wear long pants stood in for circumcisions and scarifications.

Today, in the hip hop generation, we find adult males wearing short pants in situations which would seem to demand trousers.

Campbell further tells Moyers (p. 82):

As a Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you are going to be confirmed by. But instead of scarifying you and knocking your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a smile and a slap on the cheek. It has been reduced to that. Nothing has happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah. Whether it actually works to effect a psychological transformation will depend on the individual case, I suppose. But in those old days there was no problem. The boy came out with a different body, and he had really gone through something.

Also (pp. 81-82):

... we know what the aborigines do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be a little bit ungovernable, one find day the men come in, and they are naked except for stripes of white bird down that they've stuck on their own bodies using their own blood for glue. They are swinging the bull-roarers, which are teh voices of spirits, and the men arrive as spirits.

The boy will try to take refuge with his mother, and she will pretend to try to protect him. But the men just take him away. A mother is no good from then on, you see. You can't go back to Mother, you're in another field.

Then the boys are taken out to the men's sacred ground, and they're really put through an ordeal — circumcision, subincision [a modification of the urethral opening of the penis], the drinking of men's blood, and so forth. Just as they had drunk mother's milk as children, now they drink men's blood. They're being turned into men. While this is going on, they are being shown enactments of mythological episodes from the great myths. They are instructed in the mythology of the tribe. Then, at the end of this, they are brought back to the village, and the girl whom each is to marry has already been selected. The boy has now come back as a man.

He has been removed from his childhood, and his body has been scarified, and circumcision and subincision have been enacted. Now he has a man's body. There's no chance of relapsing back to boyhood after a show like that.

Moyers: You don't go back to Mother.

Campbell: No, but in our life we don't have anything like that. You can have a man forty-five years old still trying to be obedient to his father. So he goes to a psychoanalyst, who does the job for him.

This gives us profound understanding as to why there is a "maturity gap" today.