My parents baptized me into the Roman Catholic faith in a small Franciscan church in the nearby old Rye seaport. My mother had a very small role in this second birthing. She, who brought me into earthly life through the waters of her womb, put me in the arms of a male priest who bloodlessly birthed me again into "sacred" life. It was the usual story. In olden days motherhood was celebrated as giving sacred life but now women did the messy and painful business while males presided over the clean neat rites of higher life.

There was an older form of birth rite in these islands that used milk instead of water. It grew from an ancient belief among our people that a mother was helping to form the spirit of the child while she breast-fed. The mother's milk was thus seen as very precious. An ancient monk's tale said that the mythical St. Bride, the Goddess once widely honoured in the British Isle, was made a Christian by being baptised in milk. The Irish continued to use milk for baptism until the Catholic Church in the Synod of Cashel banned it in 1172.

The equivalent rite in Judaism is not for initiation but for purification. Baptism became an initatory rite in Christianity perhaps through the influence of John the Baptist influenced by the Jewish sect of Essenes - who in their turn could have been influenced by the initiatory rites of neighbouring Greek or Egyptian religions? Eithanius wrote to the Essenes: "Besides a daily ritual bath, they have a baptism of initiation."

Childhood rites are for me important. But I do not like any rite that tries to impose an obligation on children, or presumes they arrive contaminated. Children should be welcomed into the community and those responsible swear to serve the child. (See the words of a rite that we used when our first daughter was born. Chapter 4. Thurs. p..) They are divine sparks put into the temporary care of adults. There are many kinds of children, all different, all with their own gift to bring to society. Their sexuality is divine, rich, natural - part of the beauty of this earth.

Australia's Aborigines had traditionally their own ways of bringing up their boys to control any aggressive tendencies. There are many different Aboriginal cultures but among the central Australian peoples that lived at Warlpiri in the Northern Territory, boys are allowed, during their first ten years or so, to run free with little discipline until the time came for them to be "turned around" into men through a circumcision ritual in which both men and women played a vital role. This ritual gives boys an adult set of responsibilities.

The women's part in this ritual included giving the boys their mother-in-laws, thus complementing the action of the men who gave the boys a "father-in-law" who circumscribed them, all this before the boy has a wife! They can do this because Aboriginal communities are based around a kin system of rights and obligations that is not based on blood relationships or even on marriage. When a boy has "in-laws", they say he has adult responsibilities -and thus cannot any longer live such a free life.

The Warpirri women's view of men was illustrated by their story of the Rainbow Men who wooed women with dance and song and by painting their bodies brightly. When these men were successful in their wooing a woman might agree to live with one of them - perhaps on her own land. Othertimes a Rainbow Man speared a woman in the leg and thus forced her to listen to him. He then would woo her with all the skill he could muster. Sometimes in these legends the women reject the Rainbow men and go to live in the Single Women's camp where men are not allowed. (More about these camps later (ref.page.sat.)

Thus these women saw men as changeable as the desert weather and liable to do damage. (In the north there are sometimes the most violent of dry thunder and lightning storms.) They could be kind, they could be violent. The women thought men were not to be trusted completely. One way they dealt with this was by working with the men to turn boys into responsible adults. Likewise the men's legends depicted women as somewhat fearful, scary - and necessary.

Aboriginal communities are extended families formed by varying elegant systems of sections and subsections and sometimes of 4 or 8 "skins". Only after circumcision does a boy get an adult set of relationships. Members of one skin group are "brothers and sisters" to the members of a certain other skin, are not allowed to marry members of another skin, are a "father or mother" to a different skin and so on. Generally several boys of the same "skin" are initiated together in a ritual that may take ten days or so to complete.

Girls are seen as not needing such a large spectacular community ritual in order to make them an adult. They are initiated naturally through the magic of menarche - celebrated by a private ritual among women (although I recently learnt that men may help dress the girl's hair in some communities). After this ritual in some communities the girl may wear elaborate hair decorations and body paintings while the community celebrates.

The mother of a boy tells the community when her son is ready for initiation. Then, when the men collect the boy for the ritual, she sends her power with him using a specific hand gesture. During one of the men's dances, women send their power in gestures called "lifting up the business" and "sending out the power." Every night the "mothers" affirm their link with the boy by collecting him, carrying him to their camp and sitting him in the lap of the senior "mother" while the "sisters" fed him. The "mothers-in-law" rub their ochred bodies against the boy's backs to transfer energy before the central rituals begin. After the circumcision, the women erase the marks on the ground where they say the boys were "damaged". Finally the women complete the initiation process with their own ritual in which the boys are given their mother-in-laws. Only after this final rite is the boy "turned around" into a man. (Ref Diana Bell "The Daughters of the Dreaming.")

There are birth rites in other cultures that I am glad I had avoided. If I had been born a girl in Sudan I could have been sewn up at birth to seal me from any genital sexual act until I was painfully unbound for my husband. If I had been born a Jewish "male", my infant penile flesh would have been cut with a sharp knife as if to brand my seed as Jewish! If I had been born Muslim or Aboriginal Australian it would have been later, at puberty, that I would be called on to demonstrate "manly" courage while enduring painful penile cuts. If I had been born among certain Aboriginal tribes I would have had to endure the practice of sub-incision. This entails the creation of a scar in the penile flesh called a vulva.

Why did so many cultures circumcise males? Some claimed that circumcision was carried out for cleanliness but this never convinced me. Why not then clip off our ears? They too can collect dirt. Labia have to be washed, why not the penile skin? Others have said that men developed these puberty rites in an age when female menstrual blood was recognised as sacred, rich and fertile so that men too might also shed sacred genital blood. I had learnt from anthropology that since women had a natural initiation at menarche that gave them power, a sacred genital blood shedding ritual was evolved in some Australian Aboriginal nations for boys so that they might take on this same magic. A more sympathetic interpretation is that, for Aborigines, the blood of menstruation and the blood of circumcision unite the genders in the magic of creation.

The anthropologist Chris Knight tells the following story he learnt from Aborigines. One day two women went to wash themselves in a waterhole. As the first was washing her period started and her blood went into the water. When the smell of blood reached the Rainbow Serpent that lives under the water, it started to wake up. Then the second woman began to bleed and the Serpent rose in full power and swallowed the two women. Some will stop the story here, saying this is a warning against polluting waterholes. But the real story goes further. While the women were inside the Serpent, it was continuing its work of creating the earth. When the women stopped bleeding, they left the Serpent and were unharmed. In other words, while women are bleeding they are united to the Creating Energy, one with the blood that is also shed at childbirth. When Aboriginal women shared stories with me at a waterhole by Uluru (Ayers Rock) from which the Rainbow Serpent emerged, I could not be told as a woman the male side of this story but Chris Knight reported that the men in at least one tribe teach the boys at their initiatory circumcision that this is done to give them a share in the spiritual power naturally possessed by women. (Blood Relations by Chris Knight ISSBN 0 300 06308-3 Yale Univ. Press 95)

Poet and Law woman Daisy Utemorra, an elder of the Wandjina people of the Kimberleys in Northwest Australia, is reported to have said that after men have obtained the highest degrees of male initiation "only then do they become eligible for initiation into women's law" ref. Mt.Man I myself was told at Uluru that only when men have grey hair can they learn the women's Law - and I think they said it was likewise for women.

The way Aborigines viewed menstrual blood was vastly different from that of many quite early Christian church leaders who saw all blood shed by women as an impurity, whether in childbirth or through menstruation, The fact that the menstrual cycle linked women naturally to the lunar cycle made this even more dangerous. These men thought this naturally shed female blood, unlike the blood of martyrs, linked women to a "fallen" Satan-dominated world. The Aborigines of Central Australia say their red earth symbolises the power of life and blood. The national Aboriginal flag has red for earth on its lower half, with black for the people on the upper half - and in its centre a yellow sun.

Jews were more gender-balanced in that they treated as unclean both male seminal fluid and the female monthly bleeding. But the Book of Genesis recorded a national Covenant in which God is said to have given men a unique role. "You must circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and that will be the sign of the covenant between myself and you.' 17:10. This was not a purely Jewish custom. The ancient Ethiopians and Egyptians practised "from the first" the circumcision of children, according to the Greek historian Herodotius, and may have taught the custom to the people of Palestine when their country was called Syria. (Histories 2 104 1-4)

As for celebrations of the human vagina akin to the celebrations for the penis, I found them sadly lacking. Female circumcision is still practised in some societies - including in closed communities in London's East End. But this is no celebration of female sexuality. Rather it is an horrific practice designed to limit a woman's sexual pleasure by cutting off the clitoris. In 19th Century England senior male doctors recommended the cutting off of clitorises to prevent hysteria, epilepsy and varicose veins. They would also cauterize clitorises with white-hot irons in order to prevent masturbation. A London surgeon who became president of the London Medical Society, Isaac Baker-Brown, in 1858 published details on 48 cliterectomies that he had carried out. A French doctor who was a Catholic Trappist monk, J.C. Debreyne, recommended this practice as he said the clitoris had no role in procreation and only helped stimulate lust! (Ref. Eu 317). In 1998 an estimated 70% of Egyptian women had submitted to this operation. (Ref.) There is a vastly different attitude among the Australian Aborigines. The women of Uluru laughingly had told me one of their sacred caves "looks just like a vagina" when they took me to it to tell me their own stories of creation - and as I have mentioned, they have special private rituals to honour the young woman around the time of menarche.

Christians today have no formal celebrations of menarche or male maturity but in western England I journeyed to see the Kilpeck church south of Hereford that had in its outside wall an ancient image of a woman holding her vagina open, a Sheila-na-gig. There are hundreds of these images in ancient churches and castles in Eire, England and in France. The Kilpeck church also holds a basin shaped like a pregnant woman's stomach that was taken from a still older forest sanctuary. It seems that in the earlier days of Christianity in Britain there was a much more open attitude towards depicting female sexuality. Whether her open vagina was a portal to hell or to life would have depended on the viewer's interpretation.