Australian Mardudjara Aborigines: Rites of passage ceremony

This gruesome rite of passage consists of two parts the circumcision and sub-incision. the ceremony starts when a young boy of the tribe turns of age usually about 15 or 16. upon this happening the boy is lead to a fire and is told to lie down next tot he fire while tribe members sing and dance around him and a special group called the mourners wail and cry as the ceremony takes place. a tribal elder then sits upon the boys chest facing his feet and with the help of two other men wielding special ceremonial knives the tribal elder removes the foreskin of the boy. The boy is then told to kneel on a shield and let the smoke "cleanse him" finally while in this daze the boy is told to swallow a piece of good meat which is actually his freshly removed foreskin. He is told he has now eaten a piece of his own body and that it will grow in him and make him strong. At this point the ceremony is not over in a few months time the boy is surprised and again lead to the fire with the same setting again the tribal elder sits on the boy this time with the help of a few other men the sub-incision is performed. The process for this is to shove a stick up the urethra to act as a backing then a knife is used to split the penis from the underside. once this process is completed the boy is then told to stand over the fire and let his blood fall upon the flames. At this point the boy is a man and the ceremony is complete. One of the reasons that it is thought that this ceremony is done is so men of the tribe can sympathies with the women of the tribe and from the point this sub-incision is complete the boy will forever have to squat when he pees further forcing him to sympathies with women.

Breakdown of page 89

The first sentence on this page reads "Of the Olympians, the first thing we can say is that they were new gods." Standing out above the rest of his sentence to me were the words "new gods". I am sure this could be interpreted in a number of different ways but i elected to think of it as  the Olympians being a re-imagined version of the gods already perceived by  men. And using this interpretation i continued to break down the remainder of the page. Next Herodotus is mentioned now Herodotus is an ancient Greek Historian who is often called the father of history. Herodotus goes on to say "Before Yesterday no one knew where any of these gods had come from" Meaning there is now origin for these new Olympians only the appearance so little was known it wasn't known whether they existed eternally or even what it was they looked like. It is worth mentioning that when Herodotus says yesterday he is referring to the contest of Homer and Hesiod, a Greek narrative that expands on a remark made from Hesiod's a Work of Days which took place about four centuries before Herodotus's time. It is this narrative that gave the gods their names and brought to light arts and honors held by the gods while also describing what they look like. Hesiod still puts forth an effort to establish an origin story for the gods that made sense. And not until the end were honors gifted to the new gods by Zeus. The war involving Troy is brought up and it is mentioned that the pomposity or hotheadedness of Homer is revealed to be the cause due to his presumption as to the beginning of his tale not being at the beginning but at the end. Those ten terrible years involved in the war of Troy are thought to be the reason the heroes are no more. Even though they heroes themselves are seen as a greatness Homer celebrates their death as the true phenomenon. Olympians always being happy with the way things are had fallen into a rut and not wanting to falter for their way would be content staying their current path forever. And because of this rut the Olympians were in the notion of what happened before them was forgotten.