as a religious sacrifice,as a
rite of passage marking a boy's entrance into adulthood,as a form of
sympathetic magic to ensure virility or fertility,
as a means of reducing sexual pleasure,as an aid to hygiene where regular bathing was impractical,as a means of marking those of higher social status,as
a means of humiliating enemies and slaves by symbolic
castration,as a means of differentiating a circumcising group from their non-circumcising neighbors,as
a means of discouraging masturbation or other socially proscribed sexual behaviors,
as a means of removing "excess" pleasure,as a means of increasing a man's attractiveness to women,as
a demonstration of one's ability to endure pain,as a
male counterpart to menstruation or the breaking of the
hymen, orto copy the
rare natural occurrence of a missing foreskin of an important leader,
[5][6]as a way to repel
demonesses,
[7] andas a display of disgust of the
smegma produced by the
foreskin.