The Second Cut Is the Deepest

The second cut

The Warumungu took a boy through two cuts. The first was circumcision, made in the dark to the roar of the bullroarer, the murtu-murtu, which the boy heard behind him (Spencer and Gillen 1904, pp. 351–352). “When he has recovered from the operation,” Spencer and Gillen wrote, “it is customary to perform that of subincision or parra within the course of the next month or two” (p. 354). The Arrernte of Alice Springs kept the same order. “As a general rule there is an interval of about five or six weeks between the ceremony of Lartna and that of Ariltha,” circumcision and subincision, “and it depends simply upon the length of time occupied by the recovery of the boy from the effects of the first operation” (Spencer and Gillen 1899, p. 251). The second cut was held “of at least equal importance with that of circumcision,” and the women, who took part in the first, were shut out of it (p. 252).

It was the last cut. When it was over, the elder brothers tied on the new man’s pubic tassel and told him that “he had no more operations to fear” (p. 256). Through the Centre and the north, Spencer found, “no man in any of the tribes in which these rites are practised is allowed to take a wife until such time as he has been both circumcised and subincised” (Native Tribes of the Northern Territory, 1914, p. 22). A man became a man in two operations, and the second went deeper.

What the knife did

Spencer and Gillen watched the Arrernte ariltha at dawn after a night of totem ceremonies. Two men lay one on top of the other to make a living table, and the youth was laid on his back across them:

As soon as ever he was in position another man sat astride of his body, grasped the penis and put the urethra on the stretch. The operator … then approached and quickly, with a stone knife, laid open the urethra from below.

Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), pp. 255–256

The new men squatted over shields while the blood drained into them. Among the Kaytetye, to the north, the penis was “at once slit along its length with a stone-knife” (Spencer and Gillen 1904, p. 342). In north-west Queensland Walter Roth watched the cut made in two strokes: a first “superficial incision, through skin only, extending from the external meatus down to near the scrotal pouch,” and then a deeper one (Roth 1897, p. 178). The cut runs the whole length of the underside, from the tip of the penis to the scrotum, and leaves the urethra an open channel.

The wound did not end with the healing. For the rest of his life a subincised man carried a source of blood that he could open at will. The blood that fixed the bird’s down to the bodies of dancers in the sacred ceremonies was drawn “either from the arm or from the subincised urethra,” and when it came from the urethra “nothing is done to stop the flow, which appears to cease when the pressure applied by the hand to open out the subincision is removed” (Spencer and Gillen 1904, pp. 596–597). Among the Warumungu, a few days after a youth had been subincised, the older men drew blood from their own subincised urethras in front of him, “to promote the healing of the youth’s wound and to strengthen him generally” (p. 599). Arrernte men setting out to avenge a death “drew blood from their urethras and sprinkled it over one another” (p. 598).

The people who did this gave no reason for it. “So far as I have been able to discover,” Spencer wrote, “the natives have no idea whatever as to the meaning of these customs” (1914, p. 22). It was simply what made a man, done in the presence of the totem ancestors whose ceremonies filled the nights before, and repeated in blood whenever the ceremonies came round again.

The old continent

Sixty-three Australian peoples are recorded opening the urethra. They fill a broad band from the Kimberley and the Pilbara across the Centre and the Western Desert to the Gulf of Carpentaria, western Queensland and the head of the Great Australian Bight. Spencer and Gillen concluded that circumcision and subincision had come to the Centre “at a later time, and again from the north,” over an older rite of knocking out a front tooth that the south-east kept (1904, p. 18). When Norman Tindale mapped the continent tribe by tribe, the band was still moving. The Wajarri of the Murchison, on the west coast, “had been actively proselytizing their rites of circumcision and subincision” to the people near the river mouth (1974, p. 144). The Nyamal of the Pilbara “circumcise but make only a token subincision of the glans sufficient to be regarded as ‘men’ by the invading peoples from the east” (p. 253). The Jadliaura of the Flinders Ranges took circumcision “but resisted the introduction of the further rite of subincision” (p. 211).

Wherever the second cut went, the bullroarer was already sounding, and in its own rite the roar comes back. Among the Anula (Yanyuwa) on the Gulf of Carpentaria, the boy was subincised, and then:

When all was over the boy was presented with a sacred stick (bull-roarer) called mura-mura and told that it was made, in the first instance, by the whirlwind; that it was kurta-kurta (tabooed), and must on no account be shown to women or children, who think that its roaring is the voice of a great spirit called Gnabaia, who has come to swallow up the boy.

Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904), p. 373

The Kaytetye father gave his newly cut son a churinga, and the last instruction the youth received as a man was to keep the roar going: “While out in the bush he must be sure to make the bull-roarer swing, or else another arakurta, who lives up in the sky, will come down and carry him away” (Spencer and Gillen 1904, p. 343). In the Western Desert the Antakirinya told Ronald Berndt that the first bullroarer was made for the first subincision: two iguana ancestors swung it, then cut each other (Berndt 1941, pp. 7–10). In every Australian account full enough to follow the whole course of initiation, from the Warumungu and the Arrernte to the Diyari of Lake Eyre, the bullroarer sounds in it.

Australia and New Guinea were one continent, Sahul, until the sea rose over the land between them at the end of the Ice Age. Across the atlas the same rites keep turning up on both sides of the drowned shelf, and the bullroarer with them. The second cut is one more of them.

New Guinea and the islands

On the Huon Gulf, on the north-east coast of Papua New Guinea, the boys were swallowed by a monster whose voice was the bullroarer and whose bite was the circumcision, the “kani-tooth.” When a boy bled to death the men said the spirit had kept him in its stomach, and Georg Bamler, the missionary who wrote it down, explained why: “the Bukaua and a part of the Jabim also split the glans” (Neuhauss 1911, p. 496). Johann Stössel, a missionary doctor on that coast from 1910 to 1922, saw many men whose whole glans had been split in two (Feist 2005, p. 162). Far up the same coast, between the Sepik River and Aitape, the government anthropologist E. W. P. Chinnery recorded the Mountain Arapesh initiation in 1924:

Bull-roarers (waleg), reed pipes (walias), and other noise-producing instruments connected with ghosts (sagabi), are used. The penis of the boy is incised by inserting a cassowary bone into the orifice for about half an inch and then forcing it upwards until the top of the glans penis is split.

E. W. P. Chinnery, Report of the Government Anthropologist (1925), pp. 11–12

Their neighbours did the same. At Yangoru “a sharp object such as a cassowary bone was used to split open the glans from the urethral end,” at a stream, to sever the boy’s ties to his mother (Manineng et al. 2017). Up the Sepik among the Oum, a man named Yenak, initiated in 1952, remembered cutting grass forced into the opening of his penis, a bamboo knife cut into the glans, and nettles after: “The urine came out of the incisions made until the wound healed” (Bragge, Sepik 1, pp. 409–411). In the Eastern Highlands the Awa made “deep, half-inch-long gashes that occasionally penetrate the urethra” (Newman and Boyd 1982). Other Sepik peoples bled the urethra from inside: the Banaro, in a seclusion “connected with the bull-roarer,” pulled barbed stems through it “so that the walls of the passage are cut” (Chinnery 1925, p. 10), and at Ilahita men made “multiple (up to 30) insertions of a barbed stem into the urethra” (Tuzin 1973, p. 252, n. 10).

Further out, in island Melanesia, the cut survived without its rite. On Espiritu Santo, in northern Vanuatu, a French colonial surgeon writing as Jacobus X examined a man with “an artificial hypospadias, made at puberty”: with a sharpened piece of quartz “the urethra is split from the glans to the root of the scrotum,” on subjects the chief designated (1893, p. 333). In Fiji the colony’s Chief Medical Officer, Bolton Corney, described taya ngalengale, “incising the urethra at its meatus to a point just behind the frænum preputii,” and drew the difference from Australia himself: “The Australian lays open the urethra and leaves it so once for all, whereas the Fijian expects the edges of his incision to re-unite” (1890, pp. 648–649). The Fijians used it as a cure. On both islands the bullroarer was a child’s toy (Speiser 1923, pp. 380–381; Fison 1885, p. 22). The cut and the roar had come apart there, and both outlived the rite.

Almost nowhere else

Beyond Sahul and its islands the second cut is almost unknown. Among the Samburu of northern Kenya, boys of about six to ten made a subincision of the urethra, which, Paul Spencer was told, prevented a narrowing and difficulty in passing water (Spencer, Samburu Notions of Health and Disease, p. 2; Weisz 1972, p. 329). In Central America the cut belonged to grown men and the gods. In 1576 Diego García de Palacio reported that a chief of Gotera, in eastern El Salvador, “had his member split and open, which was one of the heathen customs that the bravest used in former times,” and that in 1563 at Ceçori a man split his own member while four boys were circumcised and their blood offered to a round stone idol. A century later the friar Delgado saw the Chol of the Manché, in the forests of Guatemala, “take out the member and split it in three parts, the largest left in the middle, about two fingers long, saying spells” (Caso Barrera 2015, p. 642). That is the whole of it outside Sahul, but for one more people.

The Bembe of South Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, were ruled by the leopard society Bwamè, whose god Tembwe roars with the voice of the bullroarer, “the god-bullroarer with the leopard’s growls” (Gossiaux, p. 89). Its grades climbed through animals, and the third was Ngyo’a, the serpent. A knife called mwele, Pierre-Paul Gossiaux recorded, was used to cut the Snake-Men, and “first served to subincise the candidate for the grade of Ngyo’a” (p. 68); a carved figure of the society has its tip notched, “recalling a form of subincision that certain Snake-Men must undergo” (p. 27).

Of the very few peoples outside Sahul known to have opened the urethra, one did it to its Snake-Men, inside a cult whose god speaks with the bullroarer. In Australia the Warumungu made the same cut at the close of the great snake’s ceremonies, and the Anula gave the new man the roarer. Chance or connection, it is a striking match. Of the handful of outliers, the one that cut in ritual did it beside a snake and a roar, as the Warumungu and the Anula did on the other side of the world.