of the cycle of the year, whose end was denoted by ritual death. Thus, these events were dramatic and followed an accelerated rhythm during which the young man's life might have been in danger. Gender transformation Although the boy was physically male, he had socially not yet become a man, and therefore he had held the position of a "woman" within male society before his initiation. Therefore, the initiate young man, symbolised by the Thracian Hero, was represented beardless during his transition to manhood to mark his "femininity," as well as to show his youth and his status as an initiate, since the beard was the standard denotation of male status in Thracian society, the Thracian Hero was depicted as beardless. The Thracian warrior's initiation was an irreversible transformation that entailed going through a series of trials and solving riddles, and was associated with the mythical concept of the road full of danger which begins in one cultural state and reaches another one through crossing wild nature, and along which the Hero encountered unexpected foes personifying the forces of Chaos, destruction, evil, and death. In practical terms, the initiation consisted of the initiate young man and his tutor living by violence and plunder in wild nature, far from other people. The young Thracian warriors during this period of initiation were half-outsiders, and this status was represented in sexual transformations whereby the initiate young man was treated as a woman by the adult warriors in the form of a homosexual relationship between the new warrior and his tutor. In Thracian art, this ambivalence in the initiate's gender is represented on a vase from the Rogozen Treasure by hunters who have long braided hair like that of the goddess . In Greek mythological retellings, the Thracian initiation process is recorded in the form of the heroine Harpalyce, who, like all warrior-heroes, has only one parent, her father Harpalycus, who trained her to hunt and fight like she were a boy; that these two figures had the same name meant that their relationship was in fact not a father-daughter one, but one between a "father" lover-tutor and a "woman" beloved-neophyte. Animalistic transformation The Thracian initiate warrior also experienced a symbolic animalistic transformation in addition to gender transformation: during their initiation, the Thracian warriors lived as hunters in the wilderness, where they survived by plunder, poaching and theft, and they killed, attacked at night