form when a favourable opportunity presents itself.​[327] It might well be thought that a man’s new birth would be facilitated if, in his lifetime, he could lay up a stock of vital energy for the use of his disembodied spirit after death. That he did, apparently, by detaching a portion of himself, namely the foreskin, and depositing it in his _nanja_ tree, or rock, or whatever it might be. [Sidenote: Circumcision perhaps intended to ensure reincarnation. Subincision possibly also designed to secure rebirth.] Is it possible that in this belief and this practice we have the long lost key to the meaning of circumcision? In other words, can it be that circumcision was originally intended to ensure the rebirth at some future time of the circumcised man by disposing of the severed portion of his body in such a way as to provide him with a stock of energy on which his disembodied spirit could draw when the critical moment of reincarnation came round? The conjecture is confirmed by the observation that among the Akikuyu of {p97} British East Africa the ceremony of circumcision used to be regularly combined with a graphic pretence of rebirth enacted by the novice.​[328] If this should prove to be indeed the clue to the meaning of circumcision, it would be natural to look for an explanation of subincision along the same lines. Now we have seen that the blood of subincision is used both to strengthen relatives and to make water-lilies grow. Hence we may conjecture that the strengthening and fertilising virtue of the blood was applied, like the foreskin at circumcision, to lay up a store of energy in the _nanja_ spot against the time when the man’s feeble ghost would need it. The intention of both ceremonies would thus be to ensure the future reincarnation of the individual by quickening the local totem centre, the home of his disembodied spirit, with a vital portion of himself. That portion, whether the foreskin or the blood, was in a manner seed sown to grow up and provide his immortal spirit with a new body when his old body should have mouldered in the dust. [Sidenote: Knocking out of teeth in Australia perhaps practised for the same purpose. Extraction of teeth associated with rain.]