"When a Central Australian Aranda youngster is between ten and twelve years old ... he and the other members of this age group are taken by the men of the village and tossed several times into the air, while the women, dancing around the company, wave their arms and shout.

Each boy then is painted on his chest and back with simple designs by a man related to the social group from which his wife must come, and as they paint the patterns the men sing: 'May he reach to the stomach of the sky, may he grow up to the stomach of the sky, may he go right into the stomach of the sky.'

The boy is told that he now has upon him the mark of the particular mythological ancestor of whom he is the living counterpart; for it is thought that the children born to women are the reappearances of beings who lived in the mythological age, in the so-called 'dream time', or altjeringa.

The boys are told that from now on they will not play or camp with the women and girls, but with the men; they will not go with women to grub for roots and to hunt such small game as rats and lizards, but will join the men and hunt the kangaroo.

In this simple rite it is apparent that the image of birth has been transferred from the mother to the sky and that the concept of the ego has been expanded, simultaneously, beyond the biography of the physical individual. A woman gave birth to the boy's temporal body, but the men will now bring him to spiritual birth." (Campbell)