The principle ritual in most puberty and initiation rites is a death and resurrection ritual in which your name is changed. You die to the name you had and are resurrected with a new identity.

I once saw a film of the consecration of a group of young men who were becoming monks. They were standing in the aisle of a church, and then they all prostrated themselves, and a great canvas emblazoned with the cross was laid over them. When the canvas was removed, they were monks.

The experience of boys being initiated in Australia and New Guinea is of death. Their eyes are covered, and they hear the bullroarer coming, and they are told that the dragon is coming to consume them. When it is right over their heads and they’re about to be eaten, their eyes are uncovered, and now initiated, they see that it’s Uncle Charlie with the bullroarer.

In another such rite, described in a book about the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, the boy is in the men’s house, where there are these masked forms that he believes to be deities and punishing powers. One of them comes forward, and the boy has to wrestle with him. The man whom he’s fighting almost puts the boy down, but then he yields. He lets the boy defeat him and pull off his mask. Then the mask is not simply regarded as a fake. It is both conquered and worshiped, because it represents both the bounding and the bonding power of the Society. The boy puts the mask on himself, and he is now that power.

THE notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. The picture opposite is a classic Hindu representation of the ultimate dreamer as Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is “Unending.” In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers. heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically, she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A. Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness. Are these youths, we might ask, a dream of that luminous god,

SOCIETY AND SYMBOL”

THE MECHANISM OF MYTHS: How SYMBOLS WORK

The way that mythologies work their magic is through symbols. The symbol works as an automatic button that releases energy and channels it. Since the mythic systems of the world include many symbols that are practically universal, the question comes up: Why? And how does the universal symbol come to be directed toward this, that, or another cultural intention? Now, this subject is rather intricate, but I think I can present it in a few clear lines.

Are symbols built into the psyche or imprinted afterward? Animal psychologists have noticed that if a hawk flies over little chicks that have just been hatched from the egg and have never seen a hawk before, they run for shelter. If a pigeon flies over, they do not. Models have been made of wood imitating the form of a hawk. When such models are drawn overhead on a wire, the chickens run for shelter; if the same model is drawn across back- ward, the chickens do not. Now, since we must have initials nowadays, this is called an IRM, or innate releasing mechanism, also known as a stereo- typed reaction.

On the other hand, when a little duck hatches from its egg, the first moving creature it sees become,as it were ,its parent. It attracts itself to this feature,and then attachment can not be erased.This on-birth bonding process is known as an imprint.

Now, the question with respect to the human psyche is whether the greater number of the responses are stereotyped or imprinted. The stereo. typed response, as in the case of the hawk and the chickens, is a relationship, as though there were a precise image of that hawk etched into the brain of those chicks. You might ask yourself, Who is responding to the stimulus? Is it the little chicken, who has no experience of hawks? No. Rather, it is the chicken race, you might say. lock-key

The chicks’ reaction to a real or constructed hawk exemplifies what Jung calls an archetype: a symbol releasing energy in terms of a collective image. Those chickens never experienced a hawk before, yet they re- sponded to it. Whereas the funny little duck who has attached itself to a mother hen is quite peculiar in his way; he is an individual, not a mere type. The bond between duck and hen is the result of an imprint.

What distinguishes imprints from something you’ve simply seen and been interested in is that they come at a unique moment of psychological readiness, one that lasts for only a fraction of a minute. Once made, the imprint is definitive and cannot be erased.

As it turns out, we have found it impossible to determine any stereo- typed images in the human psyche. For our discussion, then, we will have to assume that there are no stereotyped innate releasing images in the human psyche of very much significance. The imprint factor is the domi- nant one.

So then the question comes, Why is it that there are universal symbols? One can see in the mythologies, in the religions, in the sociological struc- tures of every society the same symbols. If these aren’t IRMs, built into the human psyche, how do these get there?

Since these symbols don’t arise from inborn mechanisms and can’t be culturally transmitted (cultures vary so widely), there must be some con- stant set of experiences that almost all individuals share.

As it turns out, these constant experiences are, in fact, in the period of infancy. They are the experiences of the child’s relationship to (a) the mother, (b) the father, (c) the relationship of the parents, and finally (d) the problem of its own psychological transformations. These universal experiences give birth to the ELEMENTARGEDANKEN,the unchanging motif of the world’s cultures.