The Refusal of Holy Engagement: How Man-making Can Fail

Among Aboriginal Countrymen of the Darwin hinterland, a youth can be ceremonially circumcised only to emerge from the ceremony physically altered but unchanged in himself. Man-making can thus fail. To explain both the possibility and the consequences of crashing failure, the analyst attends to: (1) politics attendant on the maturation of males, (2) the relationship between the failed rite and the total structure for the performance of all 'Men's Business' and (most importantly) (3) the relationships between Dreamings and humans as players in the socio-religious formation (a concept derived from application of the Thomas theorem) in which there is human engagement with the holy. Argument establishes that (in logic) ontology precedes structure because the structure for holy engagement is built to accommodate prior constructions of both the human person and the personified Power that is a Dreaming.