By: Jason (aka AGoreanRPer)

One of the most important events in the life of a young Gorean was when they came of age and were allowed to take part in the citizenship ceremony and swear upon the homestone of their city. Here on Earth, similar ceremonies were once an important part of civilizations from the Indian tribes where a young man had to prove himself able to hunt and provide for the tribe to be considered a full part of the community.

The importance these rituals and ceremonies play in the emotional and mental shaping of the yound people of a society is mainly lost these days though. These social rituals and initiations served to guide and aid young boys and girls in the remaking of themselves into men and women capable of assuming their social responsibility. A culture's collected morals served as a blueprint, or the codes as it were, for youth on how to mature into an adult role. A society though has to know what maturity is for itself before the society can pass the right level of responsibility, expectations, and knowledge on to the next generation. So when there are no rituals to benchmark or measure that level of maturity as a whole for the community even in a subjective way, then the society loses its periodic social forum to consider the nature of maturity. A culture's loss of values is mainly the loss of the structure within which those social values were recalled, reconsidered, and passed on. The rituals and ceremonies are as much a societal binding process as it is a way of engraining the society's values and morals into the next generation.

Ceremonies such as a citizenship rite of passage serves to teach and instill not only the morals, or the codes, of a society onto the youth of the society, but it also passes on the value, price, and importance of the morals as well. Consider for a moment a scene from , where Thurnus teaches the youths of the village, mainly Bran Loort, what it is exactly that they had done by overstepping the codes. The youth in their desire to have more than they were ready to handle at that time overstepped the societal bounds and learned the cost of doing so. After having learned such a lesson they were all much the better for it which is easily seen by the end of the novel where Bran Loort comes running to the aid of his village leader because the codes, his social values, had now been learned and thus his actions showed him ready to take his place as a man in his community.

Consider the shorter form of training and initiating that Tarl Cabot got at the begining of Tarnsman. He was trained and taught how to survive and interact in his new community, what the group values were, and then he was initiated into the group through a couple ceremonies that reinforced that acceptance of him into the whole. It's similar to what is described when a young tarnsman is near the end of his training and is ready to take his step into manhood. He is given the task of taking a female off a high bridge of an enemy city and bringing her back home as his first slave. Here on Earth, such a thing wouldn't work but the communities here are different so it only makes sense that our ceremonies would be different too. What doesn't change however is the need for some sort of ceremony or ritual that affirms the youth are now adults and part of the community with all the responsiblities, limitations, and rewards that go with it. We don't have that here and now and our society as a whole shows the results of it.

- Jason
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