A very important event in the life of an adolescent male Aboriginal is the initiation ceremony which makes him an adult man and is performed at the first signs of puberty.
These initiation ceremonies comprise circumcision and the incision of scars on his chest, shoulders, arms, and buttocks. The rite of passage from boyhood to the manhood of the Australian Mardudjara Aborigines comprises two parts: circumcision and sub-incision.
Don’t know what sub-incision is? Read on. You’ll be wincing in pain. When an Aborigine boy comes of age, usually around 15 or 16, the tribal elders will lead the boy to a fire and have him lie down next to it. Tribal members surround the boy while singing and dancing.
Another group of men called the Mourners, wail, and cry while they perform the circumcision. The tribal elder in charge of the circumcision sits on top of the boy’s chest facing his penis. He pulls up the foreskin and twists it so they can cut it off.
Two men take turns cutting away the foreskin with knives they’ve imbued with magical qualities. The boy bites down on a boomerang as the operation takes place.
When the circumcision is complete, the boy kneels on a shield that’s placed over the fire so the smoke can rise and purify his wound. While the boy sits there dazed and in pain, the tribal elders tell him to open his mouth and swallow some “good meat” without chewing it.
The “good meat” is actually the boy’s freshly removed foreskin. After he’s swallowed a piece of his own wiener, the boy is told that he has eaten “his own boy” and that it will now grow inside him and make him strong. Now comes the second part of the initiation of the sub-incision.
A few months after the circumcision, the tribal elders take the young man again to fire. An elder sits on the boy’s chest and takes hold of the boy’s penis. Again, there are singers and men mourning at the ceremony. They insert a small wooden rod into the urethra to act as a backing for the knife.
The operator then takes a knife and makes a split on the underside of the penis from the frenulum (underneath the head of the penis) to near the scrotum. After the sub-incision, the boy stands above the fire and allows his blood to drip into it.
From now on the boy will have to squat when he urinates, just like a woman. In fact, some anthropologists posit that the sub-incision ceremony is done to simulate menstruation, allowing men to sympathize with the females of the tribe.
The ceremonies of the Mardudjara have slowly disappeared as contact with the modern world has increased and each successive generation becomes less willing to make a snack of their foreskin
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