Sorry...! had some frustrating moments when Blogspot deleted my post...
What were you doing at the age of 18 or 19? Surely not
preparing to secretly kill as many state owned slaves as you possibly could,
right? I was preparing, like many LDS church members, to serve a full time
mission to teach the gospel and serve others for the Lord. Instead of preparing
to spread the Good News, at that same age ancient Spartan males were preparing
to preform the krypteia.
Seen through a modern Westerner’s eye this Spartan male right of passage can be
seen as a very cruel concept. This right
of passage involves being thrust out into the wild with nothing more than a
knife and made to kill as many state owned slaves called helots as he could and
return to his training masters without being detected.
As with the Spartan’s LDS “training” starts at a
young age where the children receive a series of Sunday school classes and even
early morning scripture studies. They are taught gospel principles, like loving
your neighbor and providing service to the needy, within their home. Similarly, Spartans started their education
young at the age of seven where they were taken from their homes to start the agoge. Before the agoge, however,
Spartans had to prove their worth from birth where males deemed unfit were
taken to Mt. Taygetos and
thrown over the edge of a cliff or just left to die from exposure to the
elements. If the young Spartan male passed, he was allowed six more years to be
reared at home where his mother would prepare him to start the agoge and be a
proper man in society. After these six years a Spartan boy was thought to be
too old to be coddled by his mother any more. And then started the agoge.
 |
| the agoge was physically demanding |
Ancient Spartan
men spent the next ten years in rigorous physical training and tests
determination and inner strength including being purposefully underfed to
accustom the men to being hungry for future times on war campaigns. I think
back to when I would call upon my “training” and upbringing in the church and
at home as my mom sent me off to the MTC where I would start my two years
living on my own helping God’s children. I am grateful I wasn’t asked to live
in the wild with nothing but the clothes on my back to survive for a year as
was common in Sparta as part of their series of tests. The final test was
called the krypteia
where the Spartans formed a sort of band to control the slave class, or helots.
The young men were given a chance to prove themselves and put their skills of
war, secrecy and survival to a test by killing as many helots as they could in
the nearby farms without fear of legal repercussions.
These methods of rigorous training and rights of
passages were mainly perpetuated in Spartan society by an ideology or necessity
for near perfect offspring. Spartan woman longed to produce strong men who
would defend the state in the Spartan army and as a result taught their kids
from a young age principles of loyalty, survival, dedication etc before the
agoge started. Without this necessity for perfection the strict and severe
training methods would not have been kept alive throughout the years of this
ancient civilization.
While my upbringing and consequent mission service
where by no means as severe or culturally forced, I do view a mission as a form
of right of passage in the cultural not so much spiritual aspect. Two years of
service definitely acts as a maturing process. Probably all Spartan men were
forced to serve their society and were trained as such their whole life. On the
other hand most young men serve a mission out of personal choice without any
regard to cultural pressures or rights of passage.
Hmm... I am not sure this is a type of folk knowledge so much as a Spartan war school. I think the folk knowledge might be more the expectation that this is performed, that they enter this cultural institution, or really what their mothers taught them before their rights of passage. It is an interesting comparison to an LDS mission though. I agree that within the church a mission is definitely a rite of passage. Girls don't consider boys to be men and worthy of consideration as mates until they have served and proved themselves in this capacity.
ReplyDelete@ Morgan
ReplyDeleteGood point on the folk knowledge, I might think that the war skills they learned could be folk knowledge too. It is passed on with no written record, I assume at least. And buddies probably had tips for how to best survive. Like street smarts.
Good post, Will. I think it is interesting to read about what it meant to become a man to the Spartans, because the behaviors that they see as essential to manhood are indicative of how they actually defined manhood. It makes me realize that the reason we don't engage in these same activities isn't just because our traditions are physically different or because our circumstances don't allow it, but because within our culture (within American culture, or within Church culture, or within our individual families), what it means to become a man is different. Manhood (or adulthood) means something else, and therefore our behaviors are different.
ReplyDeleteSo true Lauren. I guess that those values of courage and strength and ability to assassinate slaves are to some extent no longer values that people see as being a man. Although those trates are traditionally "manly" and still are valued in society, we now have another set of traits that we see as being mature and those are the "gentlemanly" traits.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that even though this is maybe just "culture", there is a very fine line between culture and folk knowledge. Almost everything taught through folk knowledge becomes part of culture and what a culture values is exactly that which was communicated non-verbally to the rest of the people. In this instance the idea of becoming in a man this way and that they learned to value these ideals.
I'm not really sure if the expectation that these rituals are performed is really the folk knowledge. I think it's more of what Alicia said, that the folk knowledge is the skills that the men prepared and learned while going through the right of passage. Will probably had expectations from people to go on a mission, but he most likely gained an insight on missionary work through his actual "training" and completion of a mission. (Will, I hope you don't mind that I used you as an example. Feel free to correct me too!)
ReplyDelete