Coming-of-Age Rites

Comparative writing on initiation has been shaped for a century by a three-stage model of separation, transition and reincorporation, proposed from a survey of ethnographic reports and applied since to almost everything. The model is a real observation about the shape of many rites. It is a poor guide to any particular one, because it describes the choreography and says nothing about what the community thinks has changed.

Look at what is transferred and the cases separate sharply.

In Jewish practice nothing is transferred by the ceremony at all. Obligation arrives with the birthday; a boy or girl becomes bar or bat mitzvah whether anything is held or not. What the ceremony does is display the new obligation being exercised, usually by reading from the Torah in public for the first time.

Upanayana transfers a right rather than a duty: the sacred thread admits its wearer to the study of the Veda and, in the traditional formulation, to a second birth. Both the caste restriction on who may receive it and the historical exclusion of girls are argued about within Hinduism now, and reform movements have conducted it for women and across caste lines since the nineteenth century.

Confirmation transfers responsibility for a profession that was previously made by proxy. That is why it sits so awkwardly in churches that also baptise adults, and why its typical age has drifted by years in either direction depending on whether a given church treats it as a completion of baptism or as a personal decision.

Amrit Sanchar transfers membership of a disciplined body with visible obligations. It is not tied to adolescence, is undertaken by adults as often as by the young, and many Sikhs never take it.

Temporary novice ordination in Burma and Thailand transfers, in doctrine, nothing permanent at all, since the robe can be handed back after a week. In social fact it is the thing a boy does to become an adult, and the merit is understood to go to his mother.

The one feature nearly all of them share is that they are not tests. The near-universal shape is instruction followed by a public assumption of duty, and the ordeal that popular accounts expect is far rarer than those accounts suggest.

A number of the world's initiation rites are closed. The tradition that holds them does not publish their content, restricts who may witness them, and in several documented cases has formally asked that published descriptions be withdrawn from circulation.

This entry does not reproduce them, and the reason is worth stating rather than leaving as an apparent gap.

Much of what is available in print about closed initiations was obtained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by ethnographers who recorded ceremonies they were not entitled to record, sometimes by paying informants who had no authority to disclose, sometimes by simply attending. The peoples concerned have said so, repeatedly and on the record. That the material is now in libraries, out of copyright and searchable does not convert it into material that was ever properly obtained. Another article in this collection puts it in terms this one adopts: reproducing it now, on the excuse that it is already in print, compounds the original act.

The practical consequence is that a comparative account of coming-of-age rites will always be lopsided. Traditions that wrote their own ceremonies down and circulate them freely, which is most of the literate world religions, are described here in detail. Traditions that hold their ceremonies closed appear as an absence. That absence should be read as a restriction being observed and not as evidence that nothing is there, and certainly not as evidence that the closed rites are simpler or less developed than the published ones.

Where a tradition has itself published an account of a rite, or where a description was released by its own custodians, this site follows that account and says so.