Varia

Ceremonial Consummation.—Were we some day to develop a sense of the continuity of time, certain of our present day attitudes to time would become difficult to understand. The key to a not unimportant part of ceremonialism would be lost. I refer to crisis or epochal ceremonialism and what we may call rites of consummation.

Underlying initiation, marriage, and funeral ceremonies is the theory that the changes of life can be met at a set, assigned time, dragooned as it were into given periods, and this theory is tenable because the continuity of time is ignored. Dividing it seems entirely practicable.

Although this arbitrariness about time enables one to dodge change as it occurs, it does not make the facing of change less inevitable. It only allows that confrontation to be put off. Such procrastination, change met out of relation to time, calls for a celebration, results in ceremonialism. Given ceremonial, the change seems man made, not time made, not an outcome of nature. Without the ceremony the change, it is believed, would not have occurred, or at least would not have been valid. Fulfillment, consummation, is a question not of time, but of ceremonial.

Among us in certain circles this point of view has already been challenged—graduation does not mean the end of education, education goes on we say through life; nor does marriage end the story, the pair living happily ever after; we do not forget the dead after we have finished mourning them. But the very need of all these assertions is an evidence of the existence of the aforesaid point of view.

Its existence among peoples of an early culture is plain enough in their ordinary epochal ceremonial. Through initiation, a boy or girl is made a man or woman. Adolescence is achieved by way of ceremony. The sexual life is also established ceremonially—through ceremonial defloration, formal courtship, wedding rites. Death as a passage from one life to another is facilitated by ceremonial or dependent on it. Without the proper fu