ABSTRACT
In the succession of the generations the elders eventually die and leave someone their property, but since ideas are in principle immortal, title to intellectual citizenship is not so easily acquired; we have to prove ourselves. Often it seems, especially to academics, that this requires us to clear out some previously reputable figures and in this way make space for our own development. The review of the literature can become an Oedipal killing ground, and this is healthy. Zeus had to displace Kronos. On the other hand, Kronos is an ambiguous figure: the child-eater is also the benign king of the original ^ or infinitely distant ^ happy land. He is the good father of our infancy as well as the cruel tyrant of our adolescence. So also our intellectual predecessors gave us life and the means to livelihood even though we must push them back in order to find the room to think our own thoughts. One ancestor who is recurrently the focus of this collection is Pierre Vidal-
Naquet, whose `` Black Hunter'' was in its time a virtuoso piece, bringing together (as Irene Polinskaya here explains) at least five things previously unconnected: a social institution (the ephebeia), a real landscape (the Athenian frontier), an imaginary landscape (what Homer calls the agrou ep' eschatien, `` at the edge of the arable land'', a space wemeet in poetry,Oedipus' Cithaeron or Tmolus where the goddesses sought out Paris), a myth (of Melanthus) and a ritual (the Apatouria) ^ all this while finding analogous features in the Oschophoria and krypteia. Polinskaya points out that in so doing VidalNaquet treats the `` imaginary'' frontiers as equivalent to the actual frontiers where the ephebes did their service. The reason there are two sets, however, is to make them different, even contrasting; this therefore is a fault by the rules of the game Vidal-Naquet is playing. He should at least have asserted that ephebic service, for all that it took place in the comfort of civilized, nearly urban, communities, was nevertheless conceived in terms of the symbolic imagined frontiers of poetry. This collection, however, is not aboutVidal-Naquet but about `` initiation''
^ variously here a phenomenon, a category, a concept, and most frequently a
paradigm. `` The Black Hunter'' is focal because the essay brings to bear two patterns often thought typical of initiatory rites: travel from the center to the periphery and back, with a period of segregation in themiddle (VanGennep), and inversion as characteristic of the middle, liminal phase. `` On the concept of inversion'' says Vidal-Naquet, ``one could quote the whole of Le¨viStrauss's work.'' He could have said almost the same of Victor Turner, who has been even more influential in the field of Classics. It might, however, be useful to notice a difference:whereasLe¨vi-Strauss generally treats inversion as a reaffirmationof the system^ aswemight test the firmness of a framework by turning it over ^ Turner generally sees inversion as an assertion of the underlying unity of the opposites: the new king undergoes a ritual of degradation in order to assert his continuing connection with those from whom coronation will separate him. The prospective initiate is rolled in the mud in order to reduce him to that prima materia of which we are all composed. Turner was in love with liminality and anti-structure because to him they meant communitas, the deletion of social difference. In any case, segregation, liminality, and anti-structure have all been
fashionable ideas and like all fashionable ideas they have been thoughtlessly used^ among somany others, by Segal in his account of theFrogs, asRadcliffe Edmonds here shows, and by Vidal-Naquet himself in his account of the Philoctetes as argued here by David Brooks Dodd. I commend to these promising scholars, however, a word of advice I myself received long ago from Antony Andrewes, sometime Wykham Professor in the University of Oxford, and probably the best teacher I ever had. I had written a paper in which I had refuted ^ indeed, as far as in me lay, had expunged, extirpated, annihilated ^ some part of the work of a then-respected figure; he handed it back with the remark: `` I always think the best kind of polemic is just to go ahead and do something better yourself.'' As your own ideas come into fashion, gentlemen, they will be overused, and misused, by others and possibly even by yourself, because we all have a weakness for our earlier insights. This is not a reason not to have ideas. For better and for worse ideas make their own way in the world. Anyway, reading through this collection gotme thinking about initiations,
particularly about the question: what is the difference between the initiatory and the educational? Aristotle, I remember, says that the initiate at Eleusis does not learn but rather has an experience, a pathos. What is the difference? Education seems to add something on; initiation seems to make a change. Travel is broadening but not in itself usually initiatory; it becomes so if it confers a new social status: the west-African who has been to London (and can thus be called adjectivally `` been-to''), theMuslimwho has been toMecca, these become different persons from their fellows. Because it makes a change initiation means loss as well as gain. Through
education we know more, but initiation also involves the loss of innocence. Growth and discovery are not in themselves initiatory; first love is probably
not an initiation ^ but first sexual experience certainly is. The initiates at Eleusis did indeed learn something, but they learned it as a secret, therefore they could not use it, communicate it; they were burdened with it, marked by it. It did not belong to them; rather they belonged to it as members of the circle of those who knew it. Almost any experience can be initiatory of a particular person in particular
circumstances: combat, winning the lottery, incarceration, wearing evening dress, dancing in the Nutcracker, acquiring a library card, starting a new job, successfully making a joke in a foreign language. It varies with the person whether these experiences shape us, mark us, so that we are not the same for them. We recognize such an experience because it is always double: we becomenewpersons to ourselves and conceiveourselves as newly represented to the others. This new representation is a role, which we experience as an identity.We thus experience discontinuity in our social existence; on the level of the personality history that now eventuates in structure. Structure is always pre-existent to experience; roles are socially constructed,
so that the initiatory experience is one of social reconstruction. When the young Jew takes his place at the bema for the first time to chant the Torah the congregation tells him: today you are a man. Rituals of initiation develop around these moments when they recur and where there is social concern for those who are called to them. The ritual does not create the role; indeed the ritual is not always a precondition of the role, either sufficient or necessary. Because Judaism, for instance, is a hereditary condition the true Bar Mitzvah is the thirteenth birthday ^ or more precisely, the sabbath after the thirteenth birthday. On that day the Jew becomes eligible to be called to the Torah. On the other hand, a Jew has obligations that can be fulfilled only by those who are properly trained; the ceremony of a boy's Bar Mitzvah is both a demonstration of that training and a celebration of its completion. It is of course many other things as well: an occasion for family unity and the display of family unity, an occasion on which all concerned, in their different ways, rediscover and display their religious commitment, an occasion for generosity and the display of generosity. Nor is this an exceptional case; David Leitao here shows us the same kind of multiple functioning in ancient rituals of cutting the hair. Rituals are overdetermined; that is their strength. In any case the initiatory experience is not derived from the ritual; rather the
ritual is derived from the experience, which it aims to clarify, motivate, normalize, support, and explain. To be called to the Torah for the first time must always have been initiatory, even when, as in the stetl, there was no special fuss about it.ModernAmerican congregationsmake a huge fuss about it in order to make sure that it happens, and to help it happen. The occasion is something to look forward to during the training that makes it possible; the proud grandparents and the table covered with presents are signs of the value of this moment, and of the value of Jewish observance in general. The special blessings, the remarks of the Rabbi and of the candidate himself, all these are
reflections on the meaning of the event. The ritual gives further significance to what is happening anyway. Few experiences are as initiatory as puberty, which is signaled by
unequivocal organic signs: menarche in females, first wet dream in males. Puberty rituals do not make these things happen; the ritual rather gives them a meaning, tells what is happening, why it is happening, and that it is legitimate. To confer meaning in this way is a form of social action, and requires resources, fundamentally time and space. The community can set aside occasions and places where these meanings can be enacted. Through seclusion and inversion the experience of social reconstruction can be elaborated into an experience of virtual death and rebirth. Paradoxically, the elaboration of the experience makes it normal by taking it seriously: the transformation from child to adult, the ritual says, is indeed difficult, frightening, and hugely important, and we all go through it, and this is how we do. It is not the form of the elaboration, however, which makes the ritual
initiatory. The same forms can certainly be used for other purposes. The attempt to classify rituals in terms of their form is therefore misguided ^ in fact because of the overdetermination of rituals it is generally a mistake to try to classify them at all. A society wedding is not accurately described as the act of legitimating prospective children ^ although it does this ^ since this end could have been achieved at one ten-thousandth of the cost.We should notice what else is going on. Rituals should not be classified but described and explored; like dreams their meaning is indefinitely complex and probably always still to seek. It is helpful to notice that certain forms are frequent in rituals which for other reasons we would characterize as primarily initiations, just aswemay notice that dreamsof flying are first frequent in children in their sixth year. This does not mean that if I dream of flying it means that I am five years old ^ although it is worth asking if my dream perhaps signals a regression to issues which go back to that time. Also we may observe that rituals with some other purpose may contrive
initiatory experiences: to appear in an Athenian tragic chorus must have been such an experience, to which the seclusion, discipline, disguise, and public display all contributed. These are familiar techniques of initiation, and they are initiatory in effect even when employed to some other end. I agree with FritzGraf that the arreª phoriawas not an initiation^ I tend to agreewith Froma Zeitlin that its primary intention had to do with the relation between the Athenians and their soil ^ but it was certainly an initiatory experience for the little girls who carried the basket. Was the arkteia an initiation? If you believe, as I do, that everyAthenian girl was expected to go through it at some time before marriage it certainly was, but I also agree with Chris Faraone that it was sacrificial in form ^ I would suggest, in fact, that it was a kind of firstfruits sacrifice, sacralizing the cohort not by sacrificing some girls, but by each girl making her own small sacrifice. Sacrifice and initiation are, however, by
no means contrasting categories. I would also agree with Faraone that the arkteiawas distinct from the Brauronia, a peneteric festival involving, among other things, a rather raucous public procession. I would, however, further suggest that for a few girls the two were connected, and that what is `` worth boasting about'' in the Lysistrata is precisely to have been one of those select fewwho `` played the bear at theBrauronia.'' TheBrauronia, I suspect, was like a society wedding; somebody was the [prospective] bride, but that was not the main thing that was going on. Finally, there is the issue of the initiation paradigm in narrative. Obviously
a narrative can include an initiatory ritual as part of the story; that is not a problem. The application of the paradigm in narrative analysis becomes questionable when the analyst, observing that some forms of experience characteristic of initiatory rituals occur in the story, asserts that the story is an initiation or has the form of one. Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes goes to a desert island, behaves as he has not before and does not expect to again ^ and therefore is being initiated. Done rigidly this kind of analysis is worse than useless. It is however possible to see that Neoptolemus' experience is initiatory, without either reducing his story to some paradigm, or treating him as the main character of the play. Anything that makes life intelligible may be intelligible in fiction, initiatory forms included, but the meaning of the particular narrative is still to seek. I read somewhere that there are only three stories: boymeets girl, a stranger comes to town, and growing up. This might even be true, but we haven't donemuchwhenwe have seen that this or that story includes one or more of these archetypes. What is stuffed into a pigeon-hole goes out of sight and is no longer available for study ^ or, I may say, enjoyment.
