Blood Story

"...rituals of sacrifice constitute not a separate 'system' characteristic of countless cultures and religions but only so many other ways of expressing the principle that one's 'flesh' is for others to consume or enjoy. They constitute only one portion of a continuous spectrum of rituals relating to animal or human 'meat' or 'flesh', other portions of this spectrum corresponding to 'totemism', 'atonement rituals', 'hunters' taboos', 'increase rites', blood avoidances, 'menstrual taboos', 'cooking rules', 'the couvade', 'male initiation rites'-and so on almost indefinitely." (115)

"Among the many constructs through which the earliest science has come down to us is one with which the reader will be familiar-that of an immense, all-seeing, many-headed, winged, snake-like being or 'dragon,' making its presence felt in a multitude of cross-cultural images of composite beings, 'fabulous beasts', 'All-Mothers' and other monsters.

Behind all these images is the awareness the early cultures possessed of their own power. The reason for the paradoxical, dialectical nature of the imagery is the all-embracing, cyclical, conflict--transcending nature of the power itself. As we have seen, the power was collective-and therefore many-headed. It was an immense alliance--and therefore stretched, snakelike, across the landscape. It was dependent on the periodic flowing of blood-and therefore seemed bloodthirsty in its appetites. It involved the harmonization of menstruation with the periodicity of the moon-and so was experienced as cosmic, umbilical, birth-giving, astrological. Its potency was inseparable from the awesome symbolic potency of menstrual blood-which became encoded as the death-dealing snake venom or poisonous dragon breath emanating from its being. Its rhythm was that of perpetual cyclical alternation between opposite light and dark, marital and kinship, cooked and raw, fire and blood phases or states-and therefore became coded as a rainbow-like, betwixt and between entity in which all conceivable opposites were combined." (520-21)

"These women-'daughters of the Rainbow'-are indeed 'like a snake', for no creature on earth more closely resembles a river or flow, or can coil itself into so many repeated cycles. And women are indeed 'like a rainbow'-because the blood-flow is not mere physical blood. As the symbol of the sex-strike, it carries women as if from world to world. Under the blood's spell, women move from their 'dry' phase to the 'wet', from the 'cooked' to the 'raw', and also from marital life to the world of seclusion and blood unity-just as the rainbow leaps cyclically between sunshine and rain, dry season and wet, earth and sky." (477)

"When a woman is pregnant...she should keep away from pools and streams, for fear of the Rainbow-other women should get water for her.
Babies are especially vulnerable to attack from the Rainbow. In rainy weather, or if she gets near water, a mother should paint herself and her baby with yellow ochre or termite mound. And a menstruating woman should not touch or even go close to a pregnant woman or baby, or walk about in the camps, or go near a waterhole that other people are using. Traditionally, she should stay in seclusion, with a fire burning constantly to keep the Rainbow away." (467)

"...a deep feeling that it is unsatisfying merely to keep women ignorant, that it is preferable to flaunt in women's faces the things of which they are kept ignorant...As the primordial potency of menstrual synchrony is both shown to women and yet made terrifying in their eyes, men set about alienating the value of womankind's blood-making and child-bearing capacities-even to the point of claiming that the production of babies is in some sense valueless when performed by women, yet of immense culture-creating value when symbolically acted out by 'child-bearing' men." (475)

"That blood we put all over those men is all the same as the blood that came from that old woman's vagina. It isn't the blood of those men anymore because it has been sung over and made strong. The hole in the man's arm isn't that hole anymore. It is all the same as the vagina of the old woman that had blood coming out of it. This is the blood that snake smelled when he was in the Mirritmina well..When a man has got blood on him he is all the same as those two old women when they had blood. All the animals ran away and they couldn't cook them." (471)

"...wherever or whenever synchronization could be broken down, enabling men to exercise more stable and permanent marital rights in their wives, it is not difficult to appreciate how, in cultures stretching to the outermost corners of the globe, the severing of women's periodic links with 'heaven' or 'the skies' came to be conceptualized as the dismemberment of a 'winged serpent' or woman-seizing 'dragon' by some patriarchal hero who established the present permanence of marriage and order of the world." (505)

"[Levi-Strauss] suggests...that harmony and order were created only when men succeeded in prioritizing marriage bonds as the basic building-blocks of the cultural domain...I have argued that male order embodies no special creativity...at best, masculinist ritual activity and its associated mythology represents a politically distorted imprint made from a pre-existent template." (511-12)

"Although there was plenty of room for magic-for an awareness of the world-changing potency of such activities as dance, poetry, and song-religion was not needed because there was no one to mystify, no one to exploit, no one whose conceptual world needed standing on its head...Mysticism and convoluted theologism emerged only when masculinist institutions began reasserting themselves as the first step in an immensely drawn-out process which was to result in class society and so-called 'civilization.' Constructs of the 'feminine' became deified only in proportion as real women, in the flesh and blood, were deprived of their power. Goddesses, gods, and other miraculous powers could enrich themselves only in proportion as ordinary humans were impoverished-robbed of the magic in their own lives. Only in the course of this process was genuine science-or 'the ancient wisdom', if you prefer to call it that-progressively subjected to the distorting lenses of sectional interest, partisan special pleading and political ideology masquerading as science." (321-22)

"The notion of divine rule 'in harmony with the celestial spheres' stemmed ultimately from womankind's time-honored reliance on the moon as the source of her synchrony and therefore of her power. Whenever and wherever men have claimed to possess any such mandate, it has been a deception and a usurpation. The first representatives of ritual or 'supernatural' authority were menstruating women. The first 'mandate of heaven' was the legitimacy won by women when...they wrote our culture's rule in their own blood." (491)