See Jane C. Goodale, Tiwi Wives, and
Margaret Mead, Growing Up in New Guinea.
See Grahn, "From Sacred Blood to the
Curse and Beyond," in
Spretnak, The
Politics of Women's Spirituality, pp. 265-79.
In the Dakota language, the connection between "sacred" and "menstruation" is
conveyed by the word wakan. See Briffault, The Mothers, vol.
2, p. 412. Shuttle and Redgrove in The Wise Wound also discuss this.
Dudley, "She Who Bleeds Yet Does Not
Die," p.
112.
Knight, Blood Relations, pp. 246-49.
Knight lists twenty five nonhuman primates.
Thompson, Tales of North American Indians,
p. 19.
Waters, Book of the Hopi, p. 1.
Euripides, Fragment Six of the Melanippe.
This Greek text from a lost play by Euripides dates from the fifth century
B.C. In Doria and Lenowitz, Origins, p. 168.
Hesiod, Theogony, quoted in Weigle, Creation
and Procreation,
p. 3.
Mountford, Aboriginal Paintings from
Australia,
p. 6.
Rawlinson, Assyrian and Babylonian Literature,
p. 282. For a more recent translation, see Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern
Texts, pp. 60-72.
Durdin Robertson, The Goddesses of Chaldaea,
Syria, and Egypt,
pp. 1-6.
Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths
and Secrets,
pp. 998-99.
Genesis 1, King James Version (KJV), originally
published as The Good Leader
Bible.
Knight, "Menstrual Synchrony and the
Australian Rainbow Snake," in
Buckley and Gottlieb, Blood Magic, pp. 232-55..
See Hart, Drumming at the Edge of Magic,
p. 121.
See the early study by Martha K. McClintock, "Menstrual
Synchrony and[p.284]
Suppression," Nature 229, no. 5282 (January 1971). McClintock's
work is mentioned in Weideger, Menstruation and Menopause, pp.
34-35, and in Knight,
Blood Relations, p. 213. Shuttle and Redgrove discuss several
scientific experiments on light and "biological clocks" and
suggest that the ritual of
"drawing down the moon" of European wisewomen may relate to light and
menstrual synchrony. They also cite research showing temperature synchrony
of men to their female mates and among Gay male lovers. See The Wise Wound,
pp. 162ff., 326-27.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1929),
vol. 2, p. 599.
Howey, The Cat in the Mysteries of Religion
and Magic,
p. 80. Howey continues, "Various derivations of the word Sabbath
have been suggested, but perhaps none is quite convincing. In Hebrew
the grammatical inflexions show that it is a feminine form, properly shabbat-t for shabbāt-t.
The root carries no implication of resting in the sense of enjoying repose,
but in transitive forms means to ‘sever,' to ‘terminate,' and intransitively
means to ‘desist, ‘to come
to an end.' It cannot be translated ‘the day of rest,' but the grammatical
form of shabbath suggests a transitive sense -- ‘the divider'
-- and would seem to denote that the Sabbath divides the month, or, in
the case of the witches' quarterly festival, the year."
After appearance of Apsu and Tiamat, "Their
waters commingling as a single body;/No reed but had been matted, no marsh
land had appeared" (Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts,
p. 61). The Sumerian word for hut, giparu,
applies to both a primitive woven dwelling and a "cult hut." In
Sumerian moon temples, the giparu was the special temple precinct
of the moon goddess, Ningal so the "cult hut" was menstrual,
as well as sacred, in its nature.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1930),
vol. 1, pp. 35-36.
Ebihara, "Khmer Women in Cambodia:
A Happy Balance",
in Carolyn Matthiasson, Many Sisters.
Frazer, New Golden Bough, p. 668.
Ibid., p. 669.
Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology, p.
512.
2. Light Moved on the Water
Oxford English Dictionary. Perhaps Lucifer,
god of All light, fell from his high post after the solar religions
deposed him as an obsolete idea.
Knappert, The Acquarian Guide to African Mythology,
pp. 161-63.
Ibid., p. 165.
Wolkstein, and Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven
and Earth,
p. ix.
Dundes, The Flood Myth, p. 163.
Goodale, Tiwi Wives, pp. 47-50.
People gave diverse reasons for these practices,
citing the harm the menstruant could bring but also fear that she
could be harmed: "Among
the Parivarams of Madura, when a girl attains to puberty she is kept
for six [p.285]
teen days in a hut . . . and when her sequestration is over the hut
is burnt down and the pots she used are broken into very small pieces,
because they think that if rain water gathered in any of them, the
girl would be childless" (Frazer, New Golden Bough,
p. 669).
Briffault, The Mothers, vol. 2, p. 412.
Briffault refers to Numbers 19:9 ff. and Leviticus 12:2. Numbers
describes the sacrifice of a red calf and the proper method of sprinkling
its blood and purifying one's hands and clothing afterward.
Denise L. Lawrence, "Menstrual Politics: Women
and Pigs in Rural Portugal," Buckley
and Gottlieb, Blood Magic, p. 267.
Ross, Folklore of the Scottish Highlands,
pp. 75-77; Frazer, The Golden
Bough (1930), vol. 1, p. 97.
Dundes, The Flood Myth, p. 164.
Ibid.
Guss, The Language of the Birds, pp.
60-70.
Frazer, New Golden Bough, p. 667. Frazer
notes further: "Now it is
remarkable that the foregoing two rules not to touch the ground and not
to see the sun are observed either separately or conjointly by girls
at puberty in many parts of the world."
Ibid., p. 668.
Ibid.
Mead, Growing Up in New Guinea, p.
112.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1929), vol.
2, p. 598.
Frazer, New Golden Bough, pp. 667-68.
Heizer, Handbook of North American Indians,
vol. 8, p. 565.
Frazer, New Golden Bough, p. 220 (emphasis
added).
3. Crossing the Great Abyss
This creation story was related to me by Ilse
Kornreich, an Argentinian poet, who said it came from indigenous
people.
Frazer, New Golden Bough, p. 62.
Paula Weideger discusses this, Menstruation and
Menopause,
pp. 115-17, as does Chris Knight, Blood Relations, p.
428. See also Shuttle and Redgrove, The
Wise Wound, p. 66. See also my article, "From Sacred Blood to
the Curse and Beyond," in Spretnak, The Politics of Women's
Spirituality.
Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli,
pp. 22-23. The Dogon equate the clitoris with the termite mound.
They justify the operation with the argument that the clitoris
is a "masculine" organ
and if it is not excised it will grow long and prevent intercourse.
In Possessing
the Secret of Joy,
Alice Walker describes the continuing impact of this crippling
operation upon girls and women and suggests that it spreads AIDS,
performed as it is with unsterilized, crude cutting instruments,
including tin cans.
Schultz, Hombu, p. 29. Knight, Blood Relations,
pp. 404-5, reports
[p.286]
that Yurok men's sweat lodges, which menstruants also had, were
explicitly identified as the male equivalent of menstrual huts,
and that men slashed their legs to bleed while they sweated.
Heizer, Handbook of North American Indians,
vol. 8, p. 271.
Frazer, New Golden Bough, p. 224.
Ibid., p. 214.
Heizer, Handbook of North American Indians,
vol. 8, pp. 240-41.
Begay, Kinaalddá, p. 97ff.
Judith Gleason, workshop on an African women's
coming of age ceremony, at the Jung Institute, San Francisco, 1991.
She stated that the ceremony occurs years after menarche and is
not specified as menstrual.
See Heizer, Handbook of North American Indians,
vol. 8, p. 328, for one of a number of examples.
See Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths
and Secrets.
Scots-Canadian author Anne Cameron relates that the Scottish
word mon referred
to women until recently, and it originally referred only to women,
men being called wer (personal communication).
See Aswynn, Leaves of Yggdrasil: "The
term men in
old Germanic languages, as for example in Anglo Saxon, denoted
not just the male section of the folk. The words for man and
woman were ‘weapmen'
and ‘weavemen' respectively; clearly the
former means men with weapons, and the latter translated literally as ‘men
who weave,' i.e., women" (p. 89).
4. Wilderness Metaform
Frazer, New Golden
Bough, p. 668.
Ibid.
See Briffault, The Mothers,
vol. 2, p. 385; and Frazer, New Golden Bough, p. 668.
Briffault, The Mothers, vol. 2, pp. 418-19.
Knight, Blood Relations, p.
245. His theory is based in synchrony and sexuality, not the attraction
of wild dogs to menstrual blood, however. "The
earliest hominids . . . arose and for several million years
evolved in the Rift Valley and along the shores of the Afar
Gulf. Assuming that females were already tending to synchronize
for sexual political reasons . . . the ovarian cycles of closely
associated females in this setting could hardly have escaped
selection pressures to mesh in with the movements of the moon
and any tidal rhythms, however slight."
Guss, The Language of the Birds,
p. 70. This is related in a myth from the Guyana highlands
of southern Venezuela, "They're
not really dogs . . . but . . . packs of jaguars."
Knappert, The Acquarian Guide to African Mythology, p. 168.
Heizer, Handbook of North American Indians,
vol. 8, p. 423.
Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli, pp. 20-21.
Heizer, Handbook of North
American Indians, vol. 8, p. 567. [p.287]
This hypothesis is put forth convincingly
by Chris Knight throughout Blood
Relations.
See Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets, s.v. "Snake."
Mountford, Aboriginal Paintings from
Australia, p. 12 (emphasis added). Mountford continues: "The Wandjina
paintings feature beings that are eighteen feet in length with
white, mouthless faces, surrounded by two horseshoe-shaped
bows with radiant lines."
A drawing of this is in Vicki Noble's Shakti
Woman.
Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology, p.
289. Haumea also has a daughter named "Rosy
Light in the Sky" (pp. 278-79), who can be seen as a metaformic
creation of light from menstrual consciousness. Haumea has
several forms and names, including "The Place of Blood" (p.
379).
Knappert, The Acquarian Guide to
African Mythology, p. 221.
The Tantric tradition describes "Kundalini
snake," inner body energy imagined as coils of a serpent at the base of the
spine.
Knight, Blood Relations, p. 455.
Knight describes a range of meanings for Rainbow Snake that
includes "the mother of us all," creativity,
power, and a time in the distant past.
Carnochan and Adamson, Empire of the Snakes,
p. 111. Carnochan and Adamson described the thorns as an inch
long, "strong as steel and sharp as a surgeon's needle." The rite took
place in the bachelor hut, which only one old woman,
"Snake Mother," might enter; she brought the initiates food in a bowl.
Being men the authors were not allowed near the women's Snake society rites.
Knappert, The Acquarian Guide to African Mythology,
pp. 220-21, 235; Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths
and Secrets, s.v. "Coatlicue."
Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library,
p. 155. "The Hypostasis of the Archons."
In southern Ohio the "Serpent Mound," an
earthen sculpture one quarter mile long, attracts many tourists
every year. The formation, which stands twenty feet wide and
five feet high, is believed to have been built by the Hopewell
people, who are no longer recognized as a separate tribe. It
is an excellent example of a serpent form well on its way to
becoming a dragon. The long body twists in seven lunar curves,
and a spiral tail shows its connection to earth energy. Its
head is flanked by two round shapes representing protruding
eyes while the huge mouth is open like a vagina, in the act
of enveloping or expelling a large egg shape. According to
a knowledgeable Hopi man, the large triangle shape that lies
beyond the egg is a "light catcher." He
interpreted the egg shaped mound as a village whose placement
near the snake's mouth indicates that the people are under its
protection. He said further that the size of the snake's body
means it is the longest snake the people know, and that his name
is Tokch'i, Guardian of the East. See Waters, The
Book of the Hopi, p. 49. [p.288]
Vollmer, Five Colours of the Universe,
p. 18ff. Among other powers, the dragon regulated water, floods,
and irrigation.
Rawlinson, Assyrian and Babylonian
Literature, pp. 283- 84.
The angel Michael fights the dragon in the Book of Revelation, but
there the beast is male. "And
behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns,
and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third
part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth:
and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be
delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born" (Revelation
12:1 4 [KJV]).
In several seclusion rites branches
were piled over the menstruant, or were placed at the opening
of her hut, or she wore them around her waist or head.
Schultz, Hombu, p. 22.
Thompson, Tales of the North American Indians, p. 128.
"In the Tuhoe tribe of Maoris' the power of making women fruitful is ascribed to trees. These
trees are associated with the navel strings of definite mythical
ancestors, as indeed the navel strings of all children used
to be hung upon them down to quite recent times" (Frazer, New
Golden Bough, p. 115).
5. How Menstruation Fashioned the Human Body
Griaule, Conversations with
Ogotommêli, p. 82. In describing women's beauty, Ogotommeli said that "to
be naked is to be without speech."
Briffault, The Mothers, vol. 2, pp. 414-15.
Knight, in Buckley and Gottlieb, Blood Magic, p. 237.
Reed, Woman's Evolution,
p. 98. See also Briffault, The Mothers, vol. 2, pp. 412-17: "Since
woman's blood was taboo, daubing with blood became the mark or insignia
of the tabooed condition. In the course of time red ocher came to serve
as a substitute for blood."
Briffault, The Mothers, vol.
2, pp. 414-15.
Frazer, New Golden Bough,
p. 668.
Douglas and Slinger, Sexual Secrets,
pp. 241 and 352.
Briffault, The Mothers, vol.
2, pp. 390-96.
Reed, Woman's Evolution,
pp. 135, 36.
Briffault, The Mothers,
vol. 2, p. 397.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1929),
vol. 2, p. 600.
Daniels, Folk Jewelry of the
World,
p. 32.
Fisher, Africa Adorned, p.
137. The Dogon balance of gender and the body is in Griaule, Conversations
with Ogotommêli.
Daniels, Folk Jewelry of the
World,
p. 84.
Heizer, Handbook of North American
Indians,
vol. 8, p. 540.
Ibid.
Handy and Pukui, The Polynesian
Family System in Ka-'u Hawaii,
pp. 10-11. [p.289]
Sproul, Primal Myths, p. 334.
In the male origin story cited by Sproul, the god Lowa
sent two men to tattoo everything in the world, and this is how
each kind of animal got its characteristic markings.
Heizer, Handbook of North American
Indians.
vol. 8, p. 688. Rock painting was explicitly included
in menarchal rites of the Luiseno (p. 556).
Briffault, The Mothers, vol.
2, pp. 162-63. Briffault says the young Tuareg women protested
vehemently, to no avail.
Ibid.
Ibid.
6. Cosmetikos and Women's Paraphernalia
Heizer, Handbook of North American
Indians,
vol. 8, p. 173, has an example.
Frazer, The
Golden Bough (1930),
vol. 1, p. 53.
See Pritchard, Ancient Near
Eastern Texts,
p. 37.
Douglas and Slinger, Sexual Secrets,
p. 243: "Recent
pharmacological research suggests that camphor stimulates
the respiration, heart and cerebral cortex, and has a powerful
effect on activating memory. Furthermore, scientific tests
show that special preparations of camphor can increase
clairvoyance."
Ibid., p. 242.
Grieve, A Modern Herbal, s.v. "Deadly
Nightshade."
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1929),
vol. 2, pp. 596-97.
Ibid., p. 597.
Gilbert, Treasures of Tutankhamun,
p. 141.
Griaule, Conversations with
Ogotemmêli,
pp. 119-20.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1930),
vol. 1, p. 52.
Ibid., pp. 44-45. The cedar is
a red wooded tree, held sacred by many tribes.
Ibid., p. 20.
Ibid., pp. 47-48.
Ibid., p. 52.
See ibid., pp. 41, 48 49; also
Heizer, Handbook
of North American Indians,
vol. 8, p. 327: "The Wintu menstruant was not supposed
to leave her but except at night. If she had to go out in
the day, she covered her head with a basket or a hide." Frazer, The
Golden Bough (1929)
vol. 2, p. 600: "Amongst
the Tlingit (Thlinkeet) or Kolosh Indians of Alaska,
when a girl showed signs of womanhood she used to be
confined to a little but or cage .... She had to wear
a sort of hat with long flaps, that her gaze might not
pollute the sky; for . . . her look would destroy the
luck of a hunter, fisher or gambler, turn things to stone,
and do other mischief."
Briffault, The Mothers,
vol. 2, p. 382.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1930),
vol. 1, p. 46, 49.
Linda Cassius, personal communication,
1992. [p.290]
Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli,
pp. 19-21. In response to seeing the earth's nakedness,
the Nummo made a plant fiber skirt with ten long plaits in front and ten
behind (ten for the fingers). The sinuous plaits were watery and
flowing and red. According to Ogotommeli, "the purpose of this garment
was not merely modesty. It manifested on earth the first act of ordering
the universe." And
when the jackal again attempted to mate with the earth,
he grabbed her skirt and got menstrual blood on it, and stained
the earth as well.
Ibid., pp. 169-70. First the fibers
were stolen, when "a woman got hold of
them, put them on, spread terror all around her, and reigned
as a queen, thanks to this striking adornment which no one
had ever seen before." And
then the men stole the fibers from the queen, and put
them on in rites that excluded all but a few women.
Ibid., pp. 79-80. The ancestral
warp of the woman's teeth separated the threads into eighty strands,
representing the eighty Dogon ancestors so all their
history is carried in her face. Men also file their teeth, and only
men do the weaving now, though women still spin.
Turkish women wore blue turquoise
stones on their foreheads to ward off the "Evil Eye";
these were called "buts," which
seems a possible early source of the word "button." (Webster's speculates
goat's horn as source.)
Frazer has examples of women in
childbirth eating with long sticks (New
Golden Bough, p. 213). In one tribe, the menstruant
was fed with a crab claw (The Golden Bough [1930],
vol. 1, p. 37).
Ibid.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1930),
vol. 1, p. 42.
Frazer, New Golden Bough,
p. 212.
Ibid., p. 596; "With the
Awa-nkonde, a tribe at the northern end of Lake Nyassa, it is a rule that
after her first menstruation a girl must be kept apart, with
a few companions of her own sex, in a darkened house. The
floor is covered with dry banana leaves." See
also Schultz, Hombu, p.
24, for a description of the Tucuna tribe of the Amazon
region.
Frazer, The Golden Bough
(1929), vol. 2, p. 597.
Actually, she was only pretending
to menstruate, as her father was searching her tent for
some clay female images (teraphim) that she had stolen from him
and hidden in the "camel's furniture" a
leather seat about two feet high. When he entered she said
she could not rise, "for the custom of women is upon
me. And he searched, but found not the images" (Genesis
31:35 [KJV]).
7. Ceremony: Let's Cook!
Briffault, The Mothers, vol. 2, p. 389.
Ibid.
See Knight, Blood Relations, and Levi Strauss, The
Raw and the Cooked. [p.291]
Guss, ed., The Language
of the Birds, pp. 5-9.
Frazer, New Golden Bough, p. 115.
Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna, Queen
of Heaven and Earth, p. 12.
See Evelyn Reed, Woman's Evolution,
p. 116. Indigenous peoples, in Australia, for example,
say that digging sticks "belong" to
women. "Anthropologists also
point to the fact that in the primarily horticultural economies
of `developing' tribes and nations, contrary to Western
assumptions, the cultivation of the soil is to this day
primasily in the hands of women" Eisler, The
Chalice and the Blade, p. 69. United Nations
reports on women farmers and the world economy, and
mythology with its many associations of the female
with plants and agricultural rites, all confirm the
probable female origins of cultivation.
Grieve, A Modern Herbal, s.v. "Garlic."
On potatoes used as dyes, see
Sauer, Seeds, Spades, Hearths, and Herds, p. 129. Sauer's general
theory is that ceremonial purpose was at least as great a motive as desire
for foodstuffs in the development of cultivation by women: In South America, "they
colored food and painted themselves with the fruit of the
Bixa, whence, perhaps, the origin of the name red Indians" (p.
42). "Southeast
Asia included the spice lands of early commerce --- and
the emphasis on the coloring of food, person, and clothing,
especially yellow or red (as by turmeric), with ceremonial
significance attached thereto as life giving, from birth
through marriage to funerary offering" (p.
27).
Francia, Dragontime, p. 36.
Goodale, Tiwi Wives, p. 195.
Grieve, A Modern Herbal, pp. 161-66.
Ross, Folklore of the Scottish
Highlands, pp. 147-50.
Meador, Uncursing the Dark, pp. 92-103.
Sauer, Seeds, Spades, Hearths,
and Herds,
pp. 48, 128-29.
Among
some
peoples,
the
idea
of
giving
boys a menstrual, or visionary, state of mind was extended
to include males at any time of life. A particular drug is
planted, tended, harvested, and prepared exclusively by women
among the Kogi people, said to be the last intact precolumbian
agricultural tribe. But the drug, in white powder form, is
eaten only by the men, who keep the powder with them at all
times, in gourd containers they describe as "wombs." The
powder induces a meditative state, teaching the men
to concentrate on the religious principles of their people,
to remind them to keep the old taboos and to remember the
old ways in the face of encroaching modern society (see
Ereira, The
Elder Brothers, pp. 88, 92).
See
Sauer, Seeds,
Spades,
Hearths,
and Herds,
p. 142. Also Katz and Maytag, "Brewing an Ancient
Beer," p.
24.
Walker, The
Woman's
Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets, p.
637.
Thanks to
Anchor
Steam
Brewing company
for sending this information, and the instructive poem,
which they got from archaeologists when they [p.292]
decided to repeat the recipe of Ninkasi in a beer of
their own: Ninkasi beer. See Katz and Maytag, "Brewing
an Ancient Beer."
"Medieval
churchmen
insisted
that
the communion wine drunk by witches was menstrual blood,
and
they may have been right. The famous wizard Thomas Rhymer
joined
a witch cult under the tutelage of the Fairy Queen, who
told
him she had 'a bottle of claret wine . . . here in my lap,'
and invited him to lay his head in her lap" (Walker, The
Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets,
p. 637). But the claret would have been drunk as
a metaform for menstrual blood, just as Christian communion
wine is a metaform for the blood of Jesus.
In
a
compound
matrix
of
menstrual
logic, "the
same elixir of immortality received the name of amrita in
Persia. Sometimes it was called the milk of a mother
Goddess, sometimes fermented drink, sometimes sacred
blood. Always it was associated with the moon. ‘Dew
and rain becoming vegetable sap, sap becoming the
milk of the cow, and the milk then becoming converted
into blood: --- Amrita, water, sap, milk, and blood
represent but differing states of the one elixir.
The vessel or cup of this immortal fluid is the moon"'
(Walker, The
Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, p. 637).
Knappert, The
Acquarian
Guide
to
African Mythology,
pp. 168-69.
This
account is
from Griaule, Conversations
with Ogotemmêli,
p. 150.
Gomme, The
Traditional
Games
of
England,
Scotland,
and Ireland, pp. 74-6. Also Jayakar, The Earth Mother,
p. 60, explicitly states the rural Indian belief
that an "essence" of
sacrificial power passes from human sacrificial blood
to blood of horses, goats, oxen, and sheep and is
then found by digging in the earth, in rice and barley.
Also, corn-grinding is part of menarchal seclusion
rites among the Hopi (Ortiz, Handbook
of North American Indians,
vol. 9, p. 599). Thus at least the following grains
have been related to menstrual r'tu or mythology
as the "earth's
blood":
rice, barley, millet, emmer wheat, corn, and fonio.
Walker, The
Woman's
Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets,
p. 638.
Knight, Blood
Relations,
p. 414.
Ibid.,
p.
255.
Along
the
southern
California coast, Ipai and Tipai people "roasted" girls
at menarche on beds of steaming leaves for a week.
See Heizer, Handbook
of North American Indians,
vol. 8, p. 603.
Frazer, The
Golden
Bough (1930),
vol. 1, p. 57.
Denise
L.
Lawrence, "Menstrual
Politics: Women and Pigs in Rural Portugal," in
Buckley and Gottlieb, Blood Magic.
Ibid.,
p. 124.
Ibid., p.
125.
Wolkstein and Kramer,
Inanna, Queen
of Heaven and Earth,
p. 4.
Wooley, Ur
of
the
Chaldees,
p. 116.
Heizer, Handbook
of
North
American
Indians,
vol. 8. Acorn cakes were often dyed red; the Miwok
mixed red clay with acorn meal (p. 416); the [p.293] name
of the Pomo means "at red earth hole" and
includes the name for a hematite used to stain acorn
meal red (p. 277).
Begay, Kinaaldá,
p.
99ff. .
8. Parallel Menstruations
Briffault, The Mothers, vol.births and all
issues of blood are treated as regards tabu in the same manner as full
time births, and the reference to the cause of the tabu is always to the
lochia and not to the child."
Heizer, Handbook of North American
Indians,
vol. 8, p. 422.
. Linderman, Pretty Shield,
pp. 128-29. Also Heizer, Handbook of North American
Indians. vol. 8, p. 422. According to Heizer,
Wappo women scored their flesh with their nails
and with flint; the Wappo also had a special office
of "grave
robber" who dressed as a coyote and made
coyote sounds (p. 268).
Translation of "The Descent
of Inanna to the Underworld" by
Betty DeShong Meador, in Uncursing the Dark,
pp. 1931, 46, 70-91.
Gimbutas, The Language
of the Goddess.
p. 158.
See Heizer, Handbook of
North American Indians,
vol. 8: Kitanemuk (p. 566);
mourners were washed and given money and new
clothes (p. 556); Luiseno ritually washed mourners'
clothing (p. 556); Costanoan destroyed the
deceased's but (p. 491). See also traditions
of the Tubatulabal (p. 440); Karok (p. 186);
Foothill Yukuts (p. 480); Hupa (p. 173); Chimariko
(p. 209).
Goodale, Tiwi Wives,
pp. 47, 50-51.
Heizer, Handbook of North
American Indians,
vol. 8: Athapascan (p. 197);
Wintu (p. 329); Yokuts (p. 455); Gabrielino (p. 545).
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1966),
p. 106.
See Grahn, Another Mother
Tongue.
Heizer, Handbook of North
American Indians,
vol. 8, has a number of examples.
Ahern, "The Power and
Pollution of Chinese Women," in
Wolf and Witke, Women
in Chinese Society, p. 213.
Heizer, Handbook of North
American Indians,
vol. 8, p. 346: In the Nomlaki tribe it was said
that "’pain'
might be introduced into the body because of
some breach of conduct (for example, ‘fooling with a menstruating
woman')."
Begay, Kinaaldá, pp.
63-65, 79, 85-87, 95, 105. She runs five times
during the three day ceremony, always toward the east.
Fisher, Africa Adorned,
p. 116.
Bowles, Autobiography
of Jane Bowles,
p. 254.
Fischman, "Hard Evidence," Discover
Magazine,
pp. 44-51, on findings of Lewis Binford from
a site in southwestern France. [p.294]
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1966),
part 2, pp. 198-99.
Macmillan Dictionary of
Historical Slang,
p. 723: "Prick," first recorded in
1592, was English slang for penis in the era
before gunpowder, when spears, arrows, and other
penile objects were primary methods of drawing
blood.
The geographer Eduard Hahn
proposed that the motive behind the domestication of horned
animals was not economic but sacrificial, for use in
religions connected to the moon. He suggested that
milking and castrating were fertility rituals and that
the horns of the animals selected for herding signified
the lunar crescents. Since his controversial proposal
others (Joseph Campbell, William Erwin Thompson, Carl
Sauer) have also drawn the conclusion that the crescent
horns of certain animals drew the attention of human
hunters and led to domestication. To integrate this
idea with mine, all but the most recent animal domestication
--- of horses and camels --- appears to be intricately connected to
the roots of religion through menstrual rite.
See Sauer, Seeds, Spades,
Hearths, and Herds,
pp. 30-31; and Campbell, The Masks of God,
vol. 1, pp. 444-49.
Sauer, Seeds, Spades,
Hearths, and Herds,
pp. 89-90. Of twelve major large animals that
have been kept by humans pig, cattle, Zebu, water buffalo, goat,
sheep, elephant, reindeer, yak, camels (two
kinds, Bactrian and dromedary), horse, and ass eight are horned
or tusked. The horned were generally the earliest
kept; the horse and camel were domesticated relatively recently
as was the reindeer.
9. Sex, Matrimony, and Trickster Wolf
See Knight, Blood Relations,
for an alternative, though in many ways overlapping,
theory of menstrual seclusion as a female sex strike
to acquire meat from hunters.
Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets,
p. 556.
Wells, A Herstory of Prostitution
in Western Europe,
p. 41.
This version of the tale is
from The
Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, pp.
101-5.
Grieve, A Modern Herbal,
s.v. "Oak."
Ibid., s.v. "Hawthorne."
Tatar, Off with Their Heads,
p. 37.
Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli,
p. 156. The Dogon believe that the prepuce and clitoris
are female and male parts, respectively, and must
be removed so each sex is solely itself (and then
can be "twinned" by marriage).
These operations are also payments of "blood debts" (and
sacrifice, especially of women) to the earth, and
thus reflect menstrual reasoning applied to definitions
of gender.
Goodale, Tiwi Wives, pp.
47-51.
In some Jewish weddings, both the bride and groom
are carried about in [p.295]
chairs. For a tribal parallel, see Mead, Growing Up in New
Guinea,
pp. 107-16. After several days of seclusion inside
her mother's house, the young woman's family engaged
in a series of feasts and giving of presents that
involved the whole village. Her father threw coconuts
into the sea, and distributed round balls of sago
to other households. Her paternal grandmother fed
her special foods, chased her through the house,
and carried her down the household ladder on her
back.
Tuzun, Historical Costumes
of Turkish Women,
pp. 63 64, 75 85.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1930),
vol. 1, pp. 48, 49, 50. Gleason, Oya, p. 132.
Betty Bao Lord, Spring Moon (New
York: Harper and Row, 1981).
10. Number, Orientation, and the Shapes of Light
Marshack, The Roots of Civilization,
chap. 9.
Walker, The
Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets,
pp. 645-46.
Marshack, The
Roots of Civilization,
chap. 10.
Ibid., chap. 13.
Heizer, Handbook
of North American Indians,
vol. 8, has examples.
Rossiya Fajardo, personal
communication, 1992.
Gimbutas, The
Language of the Goddess,
chap. 11.
Ibid., chap 1, p.
12. See also Griaule, Conversations
with Ogotemmêli,
p. 81: Dogon women wear the "female number" incised
in their foreheads in four parallel cuts, which
are kept moist with oil because they are metaformic
of the vulva, and responsive to the Spirit of
Water.
In Dogon culture,
the marriage bed must have directional alignment.
When they consummate their union, the married couple
must lie on their sides facing each other on a bed
that signifies "earth":
the wife must face east, with her left hand resting
on her husband's hip; he must lie facing west,
with his right hand resting on her hip. See Griaule, Conversations
with Ogotemmêli,
p. 140.
See, for example,
Terrell, Indian
Women of the Western Morning,
p. 141: "The
more serious part of the ceremony took place
inside a special tipi made for the girl. She
danced continually, except for occasional rest
periods, until midnight, to the singing of a
shaman and the shaking of his deer's foot rattle.
On the fourth night, the dancing of the girl
continued until dawn. When morning came the shaman
painted the girl's face red, then made a dry
'painting' of the sun on his palm with pollen
and other pigments, pressed this on the girl's
head, and finally painted her arms and legs white.
All the guests filed past, the shaman marked
them in turn with some pigments. The girl raced
to the east."
Walker, The Woman's
Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets,
p. 673.
Howey, The Cat
in the Mysteries of Religion and Magic,
p. 68.
Knight, "Menstrual
Synchrony and the Australian Rainbow Snake," in
Buckley and Gottlieb, Blood Magic, p.
235. Initially they threw a string [p.296] loop
(of synchroneity) around honey, the reddish liquid
probably a metaform of trees' (or bees') menstrual
blood.
Ibid., p. 234; also
Mountford, Aboriginal Paintings
from Australia,
p. 6.
Frazer, The Golden
Bough (1929),
vol. 1, pp. 79-80. This people also used a cup
and ball game to bring the sun back more quickly
in the spring. See in addition, Frazer, The
Golden Bough (1966),
p. 377: Everyone in the village of the Kiwai
of Papua New Guinea played cat's cradles to promote
growth of the yam plants, and strings used to
tie the yams were generally treated with "the
usual medicine, fluid from the women's vulvae."
Kline, Mathematical
Thought from Ancient to Modern Times,
p. 11, and Hogben, Mathematics for the Millions,
p. 215.
Tompkins, Secrets
of the Great Pyramid,
p. 194.
11.The Making of the Goddess
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1929), vol. 2, p. 597.
Frazer, New Golden Bough, p. 190.
Ereira, The Elder Brothers, p. 124ff. It is when the Mamas are most in seclusion that they are most in contact with the mind of the earth, aluna.
In the hierarchy of sun priests, the most extremely secluded living far more in the spirit world than in the material world spend their lives on the tops of mountains, coming
in contact only with other Mamas. They are oracles, then, perhaps similar in function to Greek Sibyls and priestesses
-- the Pythia -- at Dodona and Delphi, or to Celtic Druid priests, who were also kept in seclusion for years.
Frazer, New Golden Bough, p. 190. According to Frazer the capitol of the native king of
Fernando Po (Bioko) was at the bottom of an extinct volcano, where the king lived with a priesthood of forty women.
He could not use tobacco, rum, or salt. He was not allowed to see the sea even at a distance, and lived out his life
with shackles on his legs in the dim light of his hut so he could
not accidentally wander out and view it.
Ibid., pp. 190-91.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1929), vol. 2, pp. 593-94.
Briffault, The Mothers, vol. 2, p. 373. Frazer, The
Golden Bough (1929),
vol. 2, p. 593: "Within his palace the king of Persia walked
on carpets on which no one else might tread; outside of it he
was never seen on foot only in a chariot or on horseback." Perhaps
the carrying of menstruants, brides, and royalty is a major reason
for use of camels and horses (as well as carriages) being developed.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary a light one-horse
carriage was formerly called a "chair."
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1929),
vol. 2, p. 594.
Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli,
p. 119.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (1929),
vol. 2, p. 594.
Frazer, New Golden Bough,
pp. 283-84, description of Cassange rite. [p.297]
Graves, The White Goddess,
p. 52.
Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna, Queen
of Heaven and Earth,
p. 99.
Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods
of Old Europe,
pp. 72, 80.
The figure (from a site at
Chatal Huyuk, c. 6000 B.C.E.) has been depicted many times,
for instance in Gimbutas, The
Language of the Goddess,
p. 107.
Oxford English Dictionary,
s.v. "Chair."
Paula Gunn Allen on the significance
of how bangs are cut among Hopi maidens (personal communication,
1982).
Frazer, New Golden Bough,
p. 117.
Kerényi, Zeus and Hera,
pp. 143- 44.
See Gimbutas, The Language
of the Goddess,
p. 70, for illustrations of the "snake goddesses."
Sauer, Seeds, Spades, Hearths,
and Herds,
p. 32.
Knappert, The Acquarian Guide to
African Myth,
p. 166.
Robert Graves, cited in Weigle, Creation
and Procreation,
p. 252.
Leviticus 15:28, 29 (KJV).
Fisher, Africa Adorned,
p. 55.
She is especially well depicted in Gadon, The
Once and Future Goddess, plate 31; the color plate displays her red color.
Knight, Blood Relations,
p. 364, see map. See also Marshack, The Roots of
Civilization, and Gimbutas Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe.
Knight also sees "seclusion" connoted in the
bowed heads and hidden faces (p. 372). A photo of pale,
weak menstruants emerging with heads bowed is in Schultz, Hombu,
plate 62.
Weigle, Creation and Procreation, p. 33.
Tam Tro Graphics, 154 Garfield Place, no. 5, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215.
Douglas and Slinger, Sexual Secrets, p. 354.
Ibid.
The Greeks grouped goddesses
in threes, as they also divided their thirty day month into three sections.
See Kerényi, Zeus
and Hera, pp. 121-23.
Ibid., pp. 114, 158-
67.
Ibid., pp. 145 47,
97 98. I have greatly simplified Kerényi's
account.
12. Menstrual Logic in the Visible World
Cohodas, "The Symbolism and
Ritual Function of the Middle Classic Ball Game in Mesoamerica," p.
99 (emphasis added).
Ibid., p. 109.
Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of
Myths and Secrets,
p. 803.
Krupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies, p. 84.
Ibid., pp. 84-88.
Frayne, "Notes on the Sacred Marriage
Rite," pp. 5-22.
This is a composite description.
The New Year's epic was read at Babylon. The preparations
for the marriage of the en priestess
are from Frayne,
[p.298]
"Notes on the Sacred Marriage Rite," pp. 5-22. The Hymns to Inanna
in Wolkstein and Kramer's Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
pp. 93-110, are full of information about the processions
and offerings to Venus as morning and evening star.
See Grahn, Another Mother Tongue,
chap. 4, on Halloween customs retained in Gay culture.
Meador, Uncursing the Dark,
pp. 92-103.
Marglin, Wives of the God King,
p. 234.
Ibid., p. 235.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 101-2: "On
that day the Bathing festival (Snāna Purnimā)
takes place, which inaugurates the car festival . . .
which also corresponds with the breaking of the monsoon." See
also pp. 234-35: "The
songs which are sung by the women at that time are called
Raja swing songs .... The women perform a dance called Catki, which
is considered the heart of the play during this festival.
The men are not supposed to see this dance. The dance consists
of the reenactment of a wedding, one girl dressing as a groom
and one as a bride. All the women join in and the excitement
reaches high peaks."
Ibid. The festivals are far more complex than I have suggested, and
the role of the king and his devadesis priestesses (sacred harlots) is to bring about the rains through carefully timed sexual and dance ritual. Ceremonial presentation of food offerings and the separation of polluted from clean elements are adhered to meticulously by all the temple
staff.
Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets, p. 139-40.
13. Narratives: Descent Myths and the Great Flood
New methods of dating stone archaeological
evidence --- thermoluminescence, electron spin resolution,
uranium series dating -- are pushing the dates of human
development much farther into the past. Some archaeologists
(Alison Brooks, John Yellen, Henry Schwarcz) suggest
that complex culture existed in Africa as long as 100,000
years ago (Shreeve, "The
Dating Game," pp.
76-83). Helene and Georges Valladas -- archaeologists
of the French Atomic Energy Commission -- have found
Neanderthal (c. 60,000 B.C.E.) and Cro Magnon (c. 92,000
B.C.E.) flints in the same small area in Israel, suggesting
the two physically -- but not culturally --- different
peoples coexisted. (Until recently it was firmly believed
that Cro Magnon had descended from Neanderthal). Their
physical differences included capacity for speech:
according to Jeffrey Laitman, an anatomical anthropologist
at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the physical ability
to produce fully articulate speech stems from skull
changes in which the larynx dropped down into the throat,
producing a sounding chamber. The skull base started
bending 1.5 million years ago, but not in the line
classified as Neanderthals. These early humans lived
between 130,000 and
[p.299] 35,000 years ago, made flints, used fire and perhaps
(from pollen evidence) put flowers in graves, but the
shape of their skulls suggests they could not use speech
as we understand it. This supports Ogotemmêli's account
-- that Word was first a red skirt, and not spoken language.
See Fischman, "Hard
Evidence," pp.
44-51.
Knight, Blood Relations,
pp. 392, 401.
Ereira, The Elder Brothers,
p. 115.
Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess,
p. 19.
Inanna's city of Uruk dates from
the fourth millennium B.C.E., though the most important
information about her dates from 3500, along with "evidence of
the earliest urban civilization . . . . the first truly monumental
temple architecture . . . and the first writing" (Wolkstein
and Kramer, Inanna,
Queen of Heaven and Earth, p. 174). Merlin Stone,
says the earliest examples of writing found in Inanna's
temple at Uruk were at 3200 B.C.E. (When God Was a
Woman, p. 40). Elinor Gadon (The Once and Future Goddess,
p. 133) dates Inanna in the first half of the third
millennium B.C.E. Thorkild Jacobsen (The
Treasures of Darkness, pp. 21-26) has Inanna on
a list of fourth millennium deities. He emphasizes
Dumuzi's part in the sacred marriage, but of course
the tradition of the ceremony was primarily Inanna's.
Good translations of the Descent
myth are in Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna,
Queen of Heaven and Earth, and Meador, Uncursing
the Dark.
See Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna,
Queen of Heaven and Earth,
pp. 52-89.
Meador, Uncursing the Dark.
Her translation retains the silence taboo. Wolkstein
and Kramer use "Quiet,
Inanna."
The poem is translated in Wolkstein
and Kramer, Inanna,
Queen of Heaven and Earth, pp. 12-27.
Ibid., p. 21.
I am using Gardner and Maier's
translation of Gilgamesh;
and also Pritchard, in "The Epic of Gilgamesh," in Ancient
Near Eastern Texts,
pp. 72-99.
Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern
Texts,
p. 93. John Gardner's translation of the myth, though
it has wonderful language and dense notes, omits the
reed hut. Gardner calls it a "reed
wall," as though Ea went to a marsh near the Persian
Gulf to a figurative "wall of reeds" growing
between land and sea. The reed hut, however, is explicitly
in the Akkadian version, and this makes more sense if
the myth is seen as menstrual -- and therefore mythoreligious
and mental -- as well as naturalistic.
Genesis 6:15, 16 (KJV). The
ark isn't square but rectangular -- 300 cubits long,
50 cubits wide, 30 cubits high, with rooms inside --
and is made of wood and pitch. The Genesis ark is,
like Ea's, three stories, with a door and window in
the side.
Genesis 9:11-13 (KJV). The
list continues (vv. 14-17): "And
it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the
earth, that the bow shall be
[p.300]
seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant,
which is between me and you and every living creature
of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a
flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in
the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember
the everlasting covenant between God and every living
creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. And God
said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant,
which I have established between me and all flesh that
is upon the earth."
Exodus 25 (KJV).
Sanskrit "measure," sar,
is also hidden in biblical Sarah.
Leviticus 15:29, 30 (KJV).
14. Crafting the Earth's Menstruation: Materialism
Jayakar, The Earth Mother,
pp. 30-31.
Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of
Myths and Secrets,
pp. 866-67.
Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library,
pp. 169-70.
Leviticus 15:24, 33 (KJV).
Myth related by a Yurok woman
in 1902. See Buckley and Gottlieb, Blood Magic,
p. 194.
See Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets;
Thass Theinemann, Symbolic Behavior, pp. 197-208;
and Heizer, Handbook
of North American Indians,
vol. 8, p. 186.
Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli,
pp. 197-208.
Buckley arid Gottlieb, Blood Magic,
p. 192.
Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli,
p. 87.
Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets,
p. 150.
Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna, Queen
of Heaven and Earth,
p. 54.
Ereira, The Elder Brothers,
pp. 93, 229. Also de Camp, The Ancient
Engineers, p. 234: The goldsmiths of Sumer used
techniques of electroplating, using a battery of
copper and iron rods in a salt solution, so the gold
particles adhered to the surface of any object dropped
into the bath. Electroplating was not discovered
again until many centuries later. The battery, too,
was kept in clay jars, as though, like the Kogi they
so much resembled, the Sumerians and other Mesopotamian
peoples also considered gold to be the earth's menstrual
blood.
Ereira, The Elder Brothers,
p. 157.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 158-59.
Jayakar, The Earth Mother,
pp. 60-61.
Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna, Queen
of Heaven and Earth,
p. 37.
Katz and Maytag, "Brewing an Ancient
Beer," p.
29.
Heizer, Handbook of North American
Indians,
vol. 8, p. 343.
Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli,
pp. 95-97. As Chris Knight pointed out, the men's sweathouse
was modeled after the menstrual hut. All this suggests
that the sacred women's seclusion hut, which in many
[p.301]
cultures needed to be rebuilt after each use, was
the basic original structure of the human village.
See Blood Relations,
pp. 404-5.
Handy and Pukui, The Polynesian
Family System in Ka- 'u Hawaii,
pp. 10-11.
Kerényi, Zeus and Hera,
p. 157.
See Meador, Uncursing the Dark,
p. 95, who cites W. Burkett, Greek Religion (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1985).
Perring and Perring, Then and Now,
pp. 110-15. The Teotihuacan temple complex included,
besides the Pyramid of the Moon, a Pyramid of the
Sun, a temple dedicated to the feathered serpent
god Quetzalcoatl, and the Jaguar Palace.
Krupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies,
pp. 298-99. The complexity of sacred measurements embodied
in temple architecture is best exemplified by the
Great Pyramid of Egypt. "It has been
shown to be a theodolite, or instrument for the surveyor,
of great precision and simplicity, virtually indestructible.
It is still a compass so finely oriented that modern compasses
are adjusted to it, not vice versa" (Tompkins, Secrets
of the Great Pyramid, p. xiv).
Ibid., p. xiii.
Ibid., p. 189ff.
Ibid., pp. 5-6.
Ibid., pp. 15 19, 63.
Ibid., pp. 26, 28, 64.
Inanna's emblematic but is
flanked by two tall reed columns shaped in circles
at the top two trees topped by streaming full moons
with the dark moon but between.
15. Crossing the Abyss to Male Blood Power
The work of Marija Gimbutas,
James Mellaart, Sir Leonard Wooley, and other archaeologists
forms the basis of physical evidence. Some researchers
argue that Neolithic awe of woman's ability to
bear children, coupled with a belief in her innate kindness,
resulted in the eventual deification of women's
nurturing and "life giving" capacities.
This seems to me a simplification that sentimentalizes
the feminine as tender and benevolent and the masculine
as inherently violent and dominating. Such stereotypes
reproduce the myths of romantic and warlike patriarchal
cultures. In this view, the "Goddess Mother" represents
only "life,"
and her associations with death, sacrifice, and murder are ignored. Riane
Eisler's description of Neolithic culture is typical: "Symbolized
by the feminine Chalice or source of life, the
generative, nurturing, and creative powers of nature not the powers to
destroy were . . . given highest value" (The
Chalice and the Blade, p. 43). Eisler and many
others have credited "the
power to destroy" exclusively to men, to "the
Blade."
Weideger, Menstruation and Menopause,
p. 115. [p.302]
Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology,
p. 530.
Knappert, The Acquarian Guide to African
Mythology,
pp. 161-62.
Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli,
p. 193.
Ibid., pp. 193-94. The ritual
thieves of the Dogon nowadays steal sheep and poultry
to commemorate the smith's daring theft of fire.
Such thefts often require ritual payments. Perhaps
a male ritual tradition also existed in older times
around the stealing of young animals from the wild.
I am reminded that a shepherd's "crook" is
also a term for thief in English. That ritual stealing
may be an extension of menstrual rite is suggested
by the fact that horse stealing was a part of the
carrot festival of my mother's ancestors in Scotland.
See Ross, The Folklore of the Scottish
Highlands,
pp. 148-49.
Genesis 30-31 (KJV) relates
a story of Jacob's "stealing" his
father in law's herd by arranging the breeding to
come out in his favor. He had been given any
"speckled cattle" born to the herd, and he used selective breeding
to make sure the young were speckled more often than
not.
See Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture;
Sjöö, The Great Cosmic
Mother; and Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets.
Ancient Snake/Satan is still venerated, his rites
kept intact by a small priesthood in the hills
of Syria who say that the powers of darkness must
be remembered. Satan lives in a cave, where they
tend him in his serpent form. (This cult is not
to be confused with underground Satanism in the
United States, which reportedly practices violence,
torture, and abuse of women and children.)
Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library,
p. 130.
Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets, p. 815. "India's Kali
Ma was the same creating-and-destroying Goddess,
with a special incarnation as Kel Mari the Pot
Goddess. Since she made the first man out of clay,
her people were Aryans, from arya,
'man of clay.' Kel Mari was related to Mari of
Mesopotamia, or Mariamne, or Miriam, or Mary, whose
name was connected with the deaths of both John
the Baptist and Jesus. Her earth, which drank the
blood of sacrificed men, might have been the same
Aceldama that drank the blood of Judas."
Jayakar, The Earth Mother,
p. 60. See also p. 39: "The carpenter ministrants
. . . break the glass bangles on the goddesses'
wrists, strip them naked, take the red powder off
their brows, pull off their heads, hands, and legs,
and put them into the baskets. Then, mourning the
death of the divine ones, they carry the baskets
to the goddesses' temple and lay them in the idol room for three days." In
many other places, goddess statues had removable limbs and head.
Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran,
Surah 81:8-9: "And when the girl child that was buried alive is asked/For
what sin she was slain . . ."
Diamond, "The Arrow of Disease," p.
66: "Smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, [p.303]
malaria, plague, measles, and cholera -ka--- are
all infectious diseases that arose from diseases
of animals."
Ibid., p. 73.
Marija Gimbutas, cited in Eisler, The Chalice
and the Blade, p. 45.
Jayakar, The Earth Mother,
pp. 37-40.
Robbins, TheWoman’s Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets, s.v. "Sexism." See
also Briffault, The Mothers, vol. 2, p.
387: In the nineteenth century, people of the Lake
Tanganyika region of Africa believed that consumption
was caused by a menstruant's kindling a fire.
Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia
of Myths and Secrets, p. 187. "In the 17th
century A.D., Christian writers still insisted that old women
were filled with magic power because their menstrual blood
remained in their veins. This was the real reason why old women
were constantly persecuted for witchcraft" (p. 641).
Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft
and Demonology, p. 193.
Yet as late as the 1800s
it existed in Scotland. Old women called "gallas"
-- (hence "gals"?) -- mourned professionally, an office recorded
in ancient Sumerian myth as that of gallaturra
or gallas. See Ross, The Folklore of the Scottish Highlands, p. 115, and
Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, p. 191.
Noble, World without Women, p.
163.
Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past,
pp. 23-28, and chap. 2 generally.
Frazer has many examples
of taboo associated with war games and male sacrifice.
He believed such games as football were once sacrificial.
Baseball also has metaformic elements. Originally,
the game was English "rounders," played
with four pegs as bases (Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years,
pp. 4-6). The ball, white with red stitching, is
lunar. After three strikes (dark moon) the player
is "out" ("dead" in
menstrual terms). If the player's stick (tree) lifts the ball
in a long enough arc (full moon), it goes off the field and
the player runs "home." When
four (number of the earth) balls are pitched wide, the player
walks the base path -- perhaps in earlier times oriented toward
the four directions. One player's turn may be "sacrificed" in
an easy out for the good of the team. Chewing tobacco
and beer are part of baseball's mystique.
MacCulloch, The Religion of the
Ancient Celts, pp. 178-79.
Ross, The Folklore of the Scottish
Highlands, p. 25.
1. How Menstruation Created the World