Male and female cults aim to promote fertility in men and women as well as of the land and, more generally, to reproduce the cosmos through a series of rituals, which may follow various stages and change children into men and women (in rites of passage or initiations), ready to reproduce the social and physical body of a given society. The practices enacted during male and female cults are intricately related to social orders and the representation of the persons and the cosmos within a society: rituals have the function of celebrating the transcendence of the whole over the part and allow society to reintegrate the individual in transition from one social status to another. Different approaches to the notion of ritual have variously interpreted such cults within anthropology, putting emphasis either on what the ritual does (its efficacy) or on what it says (its symbolism or meaning).