Leaving, for a while, the statistical view of conversion, we may turn to its other aspects. By the more advanced of religious teachers to-day the developments attendant on adolescence are taken as supplying no more than a favourable occasion for directing mind and emotion to definite religious conviction. Here the connection is admittedly more or less accidental. But by the great majority of theologians there is assumed a direct supernatural influence in the states of mind developed during adolescence. In more primitive times the connection is of a yet closer character. Puberty does not at this stage represent what a modern would call an awakening of the religious consciousness, but a direct impingement of supernatural influence. From one point of view this conception still remains part of all religious systems, however overlaid it may be with modern ideas concerning sexual maturity. And we have, as a mere matter of historic fact, a whole series of customs commencing with the initiatory customs of savages and running right on to the modern practice of confirmation. In a previous chapter it was pointed out what is the savage state of mind in relation to the beginnings of sex life as it is manifested in both boys and girls. Adolescence does not, to the primitive mind, serve as an occasion for the creation of an interest in the religious life, it is the sign of direct supernatural influence. One consequence of this is the rise of more or less elaborate ceremonials marking the initiation of youth into direct communion with the spiritual forces that govern tribal life.[148] Among the Polynesians tattooing forms part of the religious ceremony, and during the time the marks are healing the boy is taboo to the rest of the tribe, owing to his having been touched by the gods. With the North American Indians the following ceremony seems characteristic:--