From Menarche to the Sacred: Girls' Puberty Rites and the Prehistoric Origins of Religion

Abstract

This article synthesises a framework positioning the cross-cultural practice of secluding girls at puberty as a forerunner to institutionalised religion, tracing its structural roots deep into the Upper Palaeolithic. Integrating ethnographic documentation, portable art, parietal cave art, and socio-cultural history — including European shamanism and the witch cult — the synthesis argues for an overarching, deep-time continuity in human ritual behaviour associated with female puberty. Geographically widespread features common to indigenous customs, including those of Australian Aboriginal populations whose ancestral separation exceeds 40,000 years, imply that seclusion rituals were distributed globally through the demic diffusion of ancestral populations rather than through independent cultural convergence. Analysis of the structural motifs of Upper Palaeolithic "Venus" figurines — including deliberate facelessness, tapering lower limbs, and exaggerated corpulence — resolves longstanding archaeological paradoxes by demonstrating that these artefacts functioned as instructional, ritualised members of community rather than as erotica, fertility icons, or realistic anatomical portraiture. The cross-cultural fear and mystical codification of menarcheal blood catalysed the prehistoric forms of ritual isolation, sought-after altered states of consciousness, and an early form of spiritual agency. The baseline architectures of human religion were, on this account, built upon the physiology-induced threshold of female maturation.