ABSTRACT
It is difficult todetermineprecisely inwhichways rites of initiationdiffer from other rituals in which Van Gennep recognized the tripartite schema that marks a rite of passage. Van Gennep's chapter on initiations drew upon the work ofWebster on secret societies and particularly Heinrich Schurtz's study of age class societies and MÌnnerbunde ^ the Greek polis (`` city-state'') among them.1 If I were compelled to draw up a list of particular features of these rites on that basis, I would point to the following: an initiation involves integration into a group of like persons; it marks a profound change in the individual; and it is irreversible. That is, a priest who has been defrocked remains a defrocked priest and cannot go back to being a novice. The same may be said perhaps of other rites of passage, but is it true of betrothal and marriage? The idea that marriage is an initiation of sorts has been in the air for some time. Long before Vernant's quotable phrase that `` marriage is to a girl what war is to a boy'',2 the analogy between the coming of age of the young men on the one hand, and the marriage of girls occurs insistently in ancient sources. In the Demosthenic speech against Neaera, to give just one example, the speaker projects the admission of sons into the phratries and their inscription in the demes, on the one hand, and the giving of daughters in marriage as parallel, equivalent events, bywhich both girls and boys take their place in society.3 This is, of course, a false symmetry,which scholars fromVan Gennep to Brelich and beyond have explained away by pointing to the selfevident fact that `` the social activity of a woman is much simpler than that of a man.''4 That is to say, marriage is as much of an initiation as a woman can accomplish. Support for the idea that marriage is an initiation has been found in the conceit, commonplace in Greek culture, that the death of an unwed maiden is a wedding in Hades or to Hades himself.5 The resemblance of certain features of the ekdosis (the `` giving out'' of the bride) to features of funerals have been stressed: the body is washed and dressed, it changes residence, accompanied by song and by torchlight, and both ceremonies
involve feasts. These similarities ^ admittedly shared by other rites ^ have been explained by the hypothesis that the wedding produces in the woman an irreversible change and, as much as the funeral in the case of the corpse, it seals her incorporation in a new community. In brief, both weddings and funerals are initiations of sorts. But again this is a false symmetry, for although the funeral is an irreversible initiation rite, it remains to be seen precisely what kind of a transition a Greek wedding is.
