INITIATION AND THE PARADOX OF POWER A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH

BY

E. M. MENDELSON London

While initiation is a very rich phenomenon for the history of religion or comparative religion, social anthropology finds it to be an elusive one. It seems to be so much tied to the intimate development of indi• viduals that it is hard to say exactly in what way it is a part of any given social structure or organisation. The classic way of handling the matter is to talk of rites de passage, which are especially characteris• tic of simple societies. At certain selected moments in the life-cycle, society puts all members of a particular age through an initiatic process. Sociological stress is usually laid on those things the age• group learns which will make them better members of their society, and the function of initiation is related to this socializing process. This seems to me to miss out certain very important factors. In the first place, the achievement of maturity in any individual or group is a continuous process whose study is sacrificed to the discontinuity of social convenience. Yet many initiations teach an individual that social recognition at particular moments is unimportant when compared with the ceaseless process of self-improvement. More important still, it would seem that the sufferings and abstinences which are imposed on initiatic candidates have a function which is not merely that of making them better members of society. They are ambiguous, it seems to me, in that they are also teaching the individual to rely upon himself when society, as it must inevitably do at times, fails him. It is one of the weaknesses of sociology-the reverse side, of course, of its strength-that it rarely includes within itself the means of studying anyone's escape from society. It is not sufficient, however, to leave such matters to Psychology, for they, in turn, react back upon the texture of society and culture in very marked ways. One can, if one wishes, say that, in initiation, society also teaches its members INITIATION AND THE PARADOX OF POWER 215 how to do without it and talk of a function of initiation in the promo• tion of self-reliance. I prefer myself to look a little further afield. Great progress has been made in recent years by the French anthropological school under LEVI-STRAUSS in the theory of reci• procity. Briefly, the idea is that society is created and maintained through a complex network of exchanges-mainly of goods, women and language-between men, so that everyone is so dependent upon someone else for his vital needs that no escape from social life is possible. Age-old taboos, such as those against incest or the consump• tion of totemic foods, can be reduced to simple terms by saying that the hoarding of one's own goods or women damages social life by short-circuiting it: obviously independent strands of wool lying side by side are a very different matter from these same strands knit into a pattern. Nor need we be primitives or peasants to know that any desire on our part to "get away from it all" is immediately frustrated by the vision of our complex and irremediable entanglement in networks of family, friendship, business and so forth. I want to argue that the importance of initiation, in its broadest aspect, lies in that it offers a way out of reciprocity. The stress, in initiation, is always laid upon self-improvement, self-enhancement, self-completion: it is always something that is being added to the initiate and, if anything is substracted from him by abstinences or sufferings, it is only as a first stage so that something greater, more important, may ultimately be gained. In the last resort no initiation known to us leaves an individual less powerful than he was before. If, in the initiations of simple societies, the stress is usually laid on gaining socially valuable powers, this is not necessarily so in the higher forms of initiation where total power, total knowledge or any other form of completeness will enable the successful candidate to be entirely himself, living in perhaps, but not dependent upon, society. In his book on Kingship, HocART, adopting a diffusionist approach, proposes that various forms of improvement are modelled on kingship. Rituals connected with marriage, the establishment of officials and initiation itself, he argues, must all have been based on the coro• nation of kings. But I have argued elsewhere that the human capacity for symbolization is limited by its obligation to utilize the brute matter of life as we know it. When we look at these rites we must conclude that it is not the initiate who is like a king but rather a king who is like an initiate. The image or symbol of the complete power

NUMEN, Suppl. X IS