Circumcision as Ritual Initiation
By Geoffrey Leavens L.Ac.
Ancient tribal rituals, as with brainwashing imprint a very deep learning through a particular methodology. First you put the initiate into an altered state of consciousness, a trance. One way of doing this is to supply them with a total sensory overload of terror and pain. If they are old enough to have developed intellectual functioning, you give them a story to contextualize the experience and help to bury the pure facts of what was done to them. Then you give them an experience that embodies the lesson you want them to learn.
In the case of tribal initiation, the learning is, "Now you are a grown-up inner circle member of a group that will love and protect you for the rest of your life. The gods, though invisible, are also here to help and protect you as are the dead, your ancestors." In the Jewish tradition of circumcision, the context story is about a covenant with God. But to an infant, stories are meaningless. This is the story used to help bury the real learning. In non-Jewish, American culture, the story of circumcision is "disease prevention and cleanliness." It used to be "masturbation prevention." (It is largely irrelevant that these stories have no basis in fact.)
The real learning is given by the experiential facts of the event. The parents, who the baby is genetically programmed to believe are there only to love and protect and serve him, hand him over to some other who then straps him down and tears and cuts the most sensitive part of his body, the part that is designed by nature to bring pleasure, and finally cuts a piece of that part off. The real lesson is, "What you want or don't want and how you feel is of absolutely no concern to anyone. Not only do we not care enough to even try to listen and understand you, but the more you protest the more we will disassociate from you and ignore you. The world is a terrifying and dangerous place."
Often, under extreme stress and pain, babies will go into deep, almost catatonic shock and look as if they are falling asleep. They become very quiet and still. Another possible learning structured into the ritual is, "If I go numb and disassociate and hold very still, the world will stop torturing me and again start to be nice to me." This is the fact of what happens so this is what is imprinted as "reality" in the trance state induced by the torture of circumcision. If, as many other babies do, he continues to scream and struggle instead of going into shock and immobility, the learning is, "If I make enough noise and struggle hard enough and long enough, then the world will stop torturing me and again start to be nice to me." Either way, the primary lesson is of a dangerous and terrifying world. Some are programmed to fight and others to freeze in response to that threatening world. Either way, disassociation, fear and anger. For some, if I fight hard enough against the world, the pain and torture will stop and I will survive. For the others, if I freeze and go numb, the pain and torture will stop and I will survive.