Eventually, in a magazine interview, she told of being forced to undergo ritual female circumcision as a young girl, a brutal process also known, more accurately, as female genital mutilation.
All the women on the streets of Asti have debts of more than €40,000 and most will have been forced to undergo ritual "juju" ceremonies where they have been told terrible things will happen to them and their families if they don't repay what they owe.
The drawing of human blood was thought to nourish the gods and was thus necessary for achieving contact with them; hence, the Mayan rulers, as the intermediaries between the Mayan people and the gods, had to undergo ritual bloodletting and self-torture.
In some Shiite traditions a person who touches a non-believer must undergo ritual purification.
COPENHAGEN (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Kenyan families wanting their daughters to undergo ritual genital cutting are increasingly arranging for it to be done secretly at night to avoid arrest, campaigners said at a major women's rights conference.
As in that great Titian, here is a helpless being, suspended upside down, undergoing ritual humiliation.
A Johannesburg medical centre has begun offering lunch-break "quickies" at 400 rand a snip.One in three black South African males already undergoes ritual circumcision, but such operations are usually done by unqualified people and cause hundreds of deaths a year.
By sampling the blood of Africans 55 and over, he showed that those who had many injections in their youth or had undergone ritual circumcision, in which many boys were cut with the same blade, often had antibodies to hepatitis C or HTLV, a little-known virus that, like H.I.V.-1, comes from chimps and infects the CD4 cells of the immune system, but is harmless.
The researchers hope that updated statistics will enable better care for women who have undergone ritual genital cutting and strengthen campaigns to prevent it.
As a vessel of sacred power the king was surrounded by strict ritual to protect that power, and he had to undergo elaborate rituals of purification if the power became threatened.
