in their hammocks.  As for the women, the marake keeps them from going to sleep, renders them active, alert, brisk, gives them strength and a liking for work, makes them good housekeepers, good workers at the stockade, good makers of cachiri.  Every one undergoes the marake at least twice in his life, sometimes thrice, and oftener if he likes.  It may be had from the age of about eight years and upward, and no one thinks it odd that a man of forty should voluntarily submit to it."[152] Similarly the Indians of St. Juan Capistrano in California used to be branded on some part of their bodies, generally on the right arm, but sometimes on the leg also, not as a proof of manly fortitude, but because they believed that the custom “added greater strength to the nerves, and gave a better pulse for the management of the bow.”  Afterwards “they were whipped with nettles, and covered with ants, that they might become robust, and the infliction was always performed in summer, during the months of July and August, when the nettle was in its most fiery state.  They gathered small bunches, which they fastened together, and the poor deluded Indian was chastised, by inflicting blows with them upon his naked limbs, until unable to walk; and then he was carried to the nest of the nearest and most furious species of ants, and laid down among them, while some of his friends, with sticks, kept annoying the insects to make them still more violent.  What torments did they not undergo!  What pain!  What hellish inflictions!  Yet their faith gave them power to endure all without a murmur, and they remained as if dead.  Having undergone these dreadful ordeals, they were considered as invulnerable, and believed that the arrows of their enemies could no longer harm them."[153] Among the Alur, a tribe inhabiting the south-western region of the upper Nile, to bury a man in an ant-hill and leave him there for a while is the regular treatment for insanity.[154]

[In such cases the beating or stinging was originally a purification; at a later time it is interpreted as a test of courage and endurance.]

In like manner it is probable that beating or scourging as a religious or ceremonial rite was originally a mode of purification.  It was meant to wipe off and drive away a dangerous contagion, whether personified as demoniacal or not, which was supposed to be adhering physically, though invisibly, to the body of the sufferer.[155] The pain inflicted on the person beaten was no more the object of the beating than it is of a surgical operation with us; it was a necessary accident, that was all.  In later times such customs were interpreted otherwise, and the pain, from being an accident, became the prime object of the ceremony, which was now regarded either as a test of endurance imposed upon persons at critical epochs of life, or as a mortification of the flesh well pleasing to the god.  But asceticism, under any shape or form, is never primitive.