The hostile attitude of the older members of the community towards the novices, which finds an outlet in the cruelties practised at initiation, does not however spring exclusively from sexual jealousy on the part of the elders, but also to some extent from the disinclination which they feel to admitting the youths--at any rate without some payment--into the numerous secrets and privileges from which they have hitherto excluded them, and from the general tendency to grudge the abandonment of that superiority over the youths which they themselves have hitherto enjoyed. The manifestation of these feelings in some form of cruelty is most often rationalised as a desire to prove that the novices are worthy of admission to the privileges and responsibilities of the initiated and to ensure, by adding to the impressiveness of the occasion, that they will remember what they have seen and heard during the initiation ceremonies[80]. Similar motives, leading to similar manifestations, may often be observed even in highly civilised communities, where the initiation is usually one destined to introduce the individual not into adult life in general but into some special class, institution or society, or into some corporate body consisting of persons who have enjoyed some special kind of experience or mode of life. Under this head, for instance, come many of the time honoured customs and ceremonies, to which boys on entering school or joining a "gang", students on going to college, or persons joining some professional society or guild, are made to submit[81]. [Sidenote: Prohibition and licence] In other aspects of the ceremonies, however, the motive of sexual jealousy stands unmistakably displayed. Thus the rites of circumcision and subincision, the pulling out of hairs from the head, face or pubic region and the knocking out of teeth, which so frequently precede or accompany the process of initiation, are all symbols of castration; a penalty which it is desired to inflict--really or symbolically--from a number of distinct though closely connected motives, the most important being:--(1) as a means of rendering impossible the realisation of forbidden sexual cravings, (2) as a threat to show that the power of the elders still exists and that it will be exercised should the prescribed limits be overstepped, (3) as a punishment for past incestuous desires or acts (as is shown, for instance, in the superstition that if the wound caused by circumcision does not readily heal it is because the youth has already been guilty of incestuous connection[82]). The same object of preventing incest is sought in the stern "avoidances" which are often practised at the same time; as, for instance, that by which a youth must keep very carefully from all contact with his mother, even to the extent of avoiding her footprints.