In the opening decades of the twentieth century, several ethnologists became interested in the phenomenon of fasting. They found, in the words of one study, that “the custom of fasting is wide-spread among peoples at very different stages of civilization, and is practiced for a variety of purposes.” The impulse to order such multifarious data led later scholars to construct systems of classification. One such attempt describes the motivations for fasting as follows: “it may be an act of penitence or of propitiation; a preparatory rite before some act of sacramental eating or an initiation; a mourning ceremony; one of a series of purification rites; a means of inducing dreams and visions; a method of adding force to magical rites.”