Blood Story

[Rootsie]

   Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture
by Chris Knight

a review by Rootsie

“Moon made love to all the women. “Ari!” they screamed. “Why does my vagina bleed?”
    Then Moon asked his mother for a black ball and a white ball of thread, which she threw from the house. Then Moon went up the thread to the sky, and all his people watched, and they said, “My child, my child goes playing to the sky.”
    Then many women, three days after he came, bled. One woman after another, all of them.” Sharanahua-Peru (Knight, 401)

“In ancient times the women occupied the men’s houses and played the sacred flutes inside. We men took care of the children, processed manioc flour, wove hammocks, and spent our times in the dwellings while the women cleared fields, fished and hunted. In those days, the children even nursed at our breasts. A man who dared enter the women’s house during their ceremonies would be gang-raped by all the women of the village on the central plaza.
    One day the chief called us together and showed us how to make  bullroarers to frighten the women. As soon as the women heard the terrible drone, they dropped the sacred flutes and ran into the houses to hide. We grabbed the flutes and took over the men’s houses. Today, if a woman comes in here and sees our flutes, we rape her. Today the women nurse babies, process manioc flour and weave hammocks, while we hunt, fish, and farm.” Methinaku-Amazonia (Knight, 424)

“But really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women), for it is mostly all women’s business; and since it concerns them it belongs to them. Men have nothing to do really, except copulate; it belongs to the women. All the belonging to those Wauwalak [sisters], the baby, the blood, the yelling, their dancing, all that concerns the women, but every time we have to trick them. Women can’t see what men are doing, although it really is their own business, but we can see their side. This is because all the Dreaming business came out of women-everything; only men take picture for that Julunggal [i.e. men make an artificial reproduction in their rituals of the Rainbow Snake]. In the beginning, we had nothing, because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women.” Yolngu-Arnhem Land Australia (Knight, 479)

Numerous stories from hunter-gatherers across the planet contain elements similar to these. Some tell of a time when women ‘had the power, but abused it.’ Others associate the periodicity of the moon with female menstruation. Sex and power have quite obviously been human preoccupations from our very beginning.

It is not surprising that blood would be our first, most diverse, and most potent cultural symbol, or that the deities that would eventually appear are similarly various: life-giving and death-dealing, light and dark, all-this, and all-that. These deities are female, and serpentine in form: the snaking flow of rivers, the flow of menstrual blood. We have from earliest days associated blood with fertility and nourishment, with relatedness, with our human essence.

The first taboos, or sacred rules, all had to do with blood, and menstrual blood and the blood of hunted animals became metaphorically linked. The universal incest commandment comes down to this: thou shalt not sex thine own blood. The ubiquitous ‘own-kill rule’ prohibits the hunter from consuming the flesh and blood of what he kills, with related rules against even touching the blood of a slain animal, or eating flesh that has not had the blood cooked out of it. There are totemic taboos against consuming the flesh of a ‘relative,’ i.e. one’s totem animal.

And of course there is the seemingly endless variety of menstrual taboos, rules which until quite recently have been thought to prove that male-dominance and male-centered culture have always been features of the human landscape. There are rules which isolate menstruating women, which prohibit them from cooking or touching food, which say that a hunter must not lay eyes on a bleeding woman, which link menstrual blood to rot and decay, stench, uncleanness, poison, and death. Yet, peculiarly, there are numerous examples in these very same cultures of male blood rituals, in which males cut their arms and even their penises, and bathe in each other’s flows! In many cultures are male initiation rites which participants themselves identify as ones ‘stolen’ from women, and which explicitly mimic female menstruation, circumcision being the most ubiquitous example.  Does the existence of such rituals point to a time when males sought to reproduce in ritual form the life-giving blood power of women? Females were clearly the inspiration for the first manifestations of human symbolic culture. Were they also the progenitors of human culture itself?

It is important to understand that ‘taboo’ is synonymous with ‘sacred’ for hunting-gathering people. Danger and even terror exists in direct proportion to a thing’s holiness. The ‘religious’ awe inspired by menstrual blood structures and sustains the moral world of hunter-gatherer people. Is it religious fear, rather than disgust, that accounts for menstrual taboos?

   “The monthly seclusion of women has been accepted as a proof of their degradation in primitive communities, but it is far more likely that the causal sequence is to be reversed and that their exclusion from certain spheres of activity and consequently lesser freedom is the consequence of the awe inspired by the phenomena of periodicity.” (Robert Lowie, quoted in Knight, 384)

It can well be said that our distinctly human sense of time itself  is intimately associated with the imposition and lifting of  taboos which, at their root, refer to female periodicity. There are ‘raw’ times and ‘cooked’ times; dark times and light times; times for abstinence and times for sex.

The incest taboo exits worldwide. What lies behind it? Or the ‘own-kill rule’?  Anthropologist Chris Knight says it is ‘the spirit of the gift’, the essence of which is this: whatever you are giving, you are really after all only giving from your self. And your ‘self’ has no meaning or power or spiritual potency unless it is extended in an act of giving. Your self is not for you. It is real to the degree that it is given to benefit others.

It has been universally assumed that males were the makers of the first rules. But in whose interest would it be to defer sex in favor of the hunt for meat? In whose interest a stable, relatively sedentary ‘home base, and an emphasis on collective, gift-giving values over competitive ones?

“We begin, then, not with the supposed sudden emergence of male sexual generosity and self-restraint—as in the origins models of Freud and Levi-Strauss…but…with female child-rearing and economic priorities, female ultimate determination of social structure and female self-restraint in women’s own direct material interests. From this, the incest  taboo, food taboos, and the other basic features of the human cultural configuration will be derived.” (Knight, 153)

The scenario Chris Knight presents in his Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture is a compelling one for those like myself who intuitively reject the idea that ‘human nature’ represents merely a slightly more refined version of the violence and sexual competitiveness displayed by monkeys and apes.  Knight traverses the 200,000 years of our sojourn as distinctly human beings, examining the modern European interpretations of  evidence of how our ancestors made the ‘revolutionary’ leap to identifiably human culture. His argument bears directly on the grievous situation humans are facing today. I believe that the crucial battle in the struggle for our human future is to be joined in the realm of story. What is our human story?  

Knight’s theory is at odds with the prevailing capitalist creation-myth put forward for most of the history of anthropology. As he examines mythological, ritual, and archaeological evidence, Knight explicitly and unapologetically brings his own ‘bias’ to the picture. He is looking for human solidarity and collective action on behalf of the well-being of all. In the relations between the earliest males and females, he, like Marx and Engels before him, identifies the very first ‘class struggle,’ and theorizes a female revolution.

It is of course every human’s prerogative and tendency to look for the evidence that reflects his or her preferred story. This, Knight insists, bears directly on the development of modern science.

“The constructs of the natural sciences arise out of humanity’s growing power to harness the forces of the world around us. Astronomy made possible the earliest calendars, predictions of eclipses, accurate marine navigation and so on…The modern sciences of physics, chemistry, information technology and the natural sciences in general have today given us collectively an immense power to harness natural forces of all kinds…
In this perspective, anything that enhances our  power—the survival capabilities of the species as a whole at this stage of our evolution on this planet—can be termed ‘science’; any human construct that denies us power, or restricts power only to some sectional interest or ruling elite, is ideology or myth…Regardless of the precise proportion of ‘myth’ to ‘science’ in any one narrative, it is the extent of the internalization  of any construct—the global, species-wide range of the human power it can convey—which gives it whatever scientific status it can ultimately lay claim to.” (517)

Is science in one respect, as Knight suggests, a story which gives power to the many? We in the West are under the sway of Enlightenment-era beliefs about the absolute authority of ‘science.’ Here it is essential to recall that a most pervasive feature of 18th-20th century European and American science across its entire range, from philology, to archaeology, to psychology, to anthropology, ‘natural philosophy’, and the many branches of biology, was its virulent racism, its vigorous attempts to prove beyond refutation the beauty and superiority of white skin, and perhaps even more deeply, of maleness. G.Herve, a colleague of Paul Broca (founder of the Anthropological Society of Paris) in 1881 gave this piece of evidence to prove the inferiority of blacks:  “Men of the black races have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white women.” (Gould, 103)  Craniometry, the measuring of skulls and the weighing of brains, was the principal statistical method employed in 19th century biological science.

It almost goes without saying that white males have appropriated the right to tell the human story. From 1650 or so well into the twentieth century, white male supremacy has been the guiding myth of the West, masquerading as science. The material power it bestowed to a privileged few is undeniable, and to this day its power is not yet broken, though it is being bit-by-bit inexorably chipped away. Knight insists that we have not seen the last of the culture-creating and culture-sustaining aspects of our ancestors’ ‘science.’

“The most basic teaching of dialectical materialism is that evolutionary time is not linear but curved, like Einstein’s space, and that its curves form spiral-like patterns, each return to the point of origin being in fact not a simple return but a ‘return on a higher plane.’ We have been here, on this point on the spiral—before. The revolution’s outcome is not simply ‘in the future’ conceived as something abstracted from the past. As we fight to become free, it is as if we were becoming human for the first time in our lives. But in this sense, because it concerns becoming human, the birth process we have got to win—our survival depends on it—has in the deepest sense been won already. None of us would be here had it not been.” (533)

Knight’s counter-narrative in Blood Relations concerns itself with the monolithic European construct of gender.  He describes “the origin myth of Western capitalism” (52) as the general anthropological conclusion that

“…females are and always have been passive sexual valuables to be fought over, renounced, exchanged  or otherwise manipulated by dominant males…Male dominance is said to have preceded the establishment of human society, and to have continued unbroken and unchallenged throughout humanity’s origins and subsequent development…the status of the male is measured by his control over females.” (55)

[Rootsie]

Knight argues to the contrary that distinctively human culture (language, symbol and ritual, hearth and home, the ability to flourish in resource-scarce environments) could not possibly have arisen had humans not found a way to move beyond the sort of social organization we see in lower primates, so marked by male/female tension, but has its origins in an amazingly widespread “revolution,” conceived and executed by females.

”’Primate dominance’ is, from this perspective, the antithesis of culture. It is the pseudo-law, the pseudo-order of alliances in the service of purely sectional interests—the patterned, structured outcome of self-seeking interaction based on inducement, threat, and fear. Such a situation leads each individual to look to itself, to use its intelligence only in the most Machiavellian of ways to attempt to bend others to its sectional interests (interpretable ultimately as those of its genes) and to display ultimate indifference to the fate of the wider community of which it is a part. There is no way that this could have led to culture—except along the road of revolutionary, point-by-point negation and overthrow of its logic” (298 )

In spite of the exhaustive evidence Knight presents to defend his thesis, I have come to realize that it is not particularly important to me whether the narrative he has woven is in all respects ‘true’: others have obviously taken the same evidence to draw radically different conclusions. What matters is that there are increasing millions of us on this planet who yearn for a story that will take us forward into a more humane, less destructive dispensation. The value of Knight’s work may lie more in his methodical deconstruction of white male assumption, which many of us view with nothing short of terror for the future of the planet itself. We love stories like his because we love humanity, and because we resist the pessimistic, even nihilistic view of human nature that tells our children they are hopelessly violent, competitive creatures who will never find a way to conquer their brute impulses. I like to believe that the first time a group of us did better is proof enough that we all can. And must.

As much as any material artifact, the stories which have been handed down over the tens of thousands of years of our human history tell us who we have been and how we came to be as we are.

Sociobiologists like to look to primate behavior for human cultural roots. Knight discusses the problem with this view, for if nothing else, it is clear that the antagonistic sexual politics of apes goes far to prevent the solidarity that would have had to exist in order for human culture to evolve. Males maximize their reproductive fitness by impregnating as many females as possible (vi). Primate males are in constant, and often violent, competition with each other for the right to inseminate. There is not a single instance in monkey or ape society in which males reliably bring food to their offspring.

It must be the complexity of social life that created the selection pressure for larger brains, and the metabolic needs of bigger brains are such that infants need close care and high-level nutrition. This translates into relatively sedentary groups of women and children, i.e. hearth and home. Knight suggests that it is this imperative that gave rise to the hunt for meat by groups of males. But what would compel males who were in constant competition for sexual access to females to leave them for days at a time to go out on a hunt? It is quite common for primate males to murder offspring in order to increase their access to females. Females, as the caregivers of children, would obviously have to be the agents of such a revolutionary change in priorities.

“…Male dominance had to be overthrown because the unending prioritizing of male short-term sexual interests could lead only to the permanence and institutionalization of  behavioral conflict between the sexes, between the generations, and also between rival males.  If the symbolic cultural domain was to emerge, what was needed was a political collectivity—an alliance—capable of transcending such conflicts.” (514)

In Knight’s view, somewhere along the line females banded together and said “no.”  They would have had to act in concert, for if one female said no while the next said yes, well…  

Upon this “no” hinges all distinctly human development.

Knight proposes that primordial females organized ‘sex strikes’ which coincided with synchronized menstruation. The relationship between ‘menses’ and ‘moon’, and the identification of women as being moon and tide-driven are most ancient concepts, and appear the world over, particularly in symbolic culture and ritual. It seems natural that coastal and riverine people would come to use the moon to mark time. The mtDNA evidence shows that humans migrated about 90,000 years ago out of the lake district of Africa along the coasts all the way to southern China in a mere 10,000 years. They did not move into the interior of Asia until 40-45,000 years ago. (Oppenheimer)

In order for Knight’s thesis to have any validity, there would need to be widespread evidence of female solidarity among our earliest ancestors.  There is, and it is encoded in the remarkably consistent preoccupations of symbolic culture among hunter-gatherers from the most ancient times to this very day. There is indeed a world song. It is a song of blood.

Over the history of humanity and across the planet, hunter-gatherer communities share a constellation of practices, rituals, and rules which revolve around sexual morality, blood initiation, the hunt for meat, and an observance of cyclical time, most often represented by the moon.

Hunter-gatherer cultures did and do:
• Practice menstrual avoidance
• View sexual avoidance as necessary for success in hunting
• Link abstinence with sexual avoidance
• Draw a sharp distinction between raw and cooked
• Make mythological/metaphorical connections between female blood and the blood of game animals

“Selection pressures in favor of heavier menstrual bleeding resulted in part from women’s need for visible signals to help keep track of their own and one another’s cycles. The use of blood in this context also meshed with a focus on blood spilled periodically by men in the hunt, an idea which ties in with the view of classical scholars that the first true ‘contracts’ had always to be ‘signed’ in blood. The result was a blood-centered symbolic system which linked game animals and the female body into a tightly integrated web of meanings which generated the stylistic characteristics and distribution of much early Upper Paleolithic art. These characteristics included periodic notation systems, the use of ochre as a blood substitute, the recurrent association of vulva engravings with those of animals, figurines which emphasize the female reproductive organs—and, more generally [what has been described as]…the art’s suggestively lunar/menstrual as well as seasonal or ‘time-factored’ internal logic.
…Just as females collectively synchronized and extended their receptivity to motivate male provisioning, so—by the same token—they collectively refused sex whenever meat supplies were exhausted or men attempted to approach without meat…The need to signal ‘no’ in visually and physiologically emphatic ways would explain both the biological accentuation of menstruation and its associated symbolic negativity.” (282-83)

“No meat, no sex.” That is the first rule.

The dark moon in hunter-gatherer cultures is associated with menstruation,sexual abstinence, ‘rawness’, ‘wetness’, while the full moon is marked by cooking fires, male/female sexual bonding, music and dance. How could primate sex with its constant undercurrent of coercion have evolved into a joyful liberatory activity marked by feasting, drum, and dance? The obvious answer is that there was a break in the continuity of male dominance, an idea that runs counter to the assumptions of European anthropology.

“’I believe’, wrote Sir Edmund Leach (1962)…that we social anthropologists are like the mediaeval Ptolemaic astronomers; we spend our time trying to fit the facts of the objective world into the framework of a set of concepts which have been developed a priori  instead of from observation.’” (528 )

Europeans wanted to see male-dominance and capitalism when they looked at hunter-gatherer cultures.  Claude Levi-Strauss’s voluminous compilation of myths and their common motifs from across the globe actually contradicted his own insistent conclusions.  His assumption was that:

"One group of males 'gave' its females to another, trusting that the recipients would reciprocate in kind. This was the quantum leap in which culture was born. Gift-giving on such a level was the ultimate in generosity, for a woman was the most precious of possible gifts. From this point on, the daughters and sisters reared in each group were valued as potential gifts, to be used by their male kin in order to make social relationships with other groups of men.” (p.75)

Females are commodities. Human society is based on the exchange of said commodities. No consideration is given to the possibility that women as active agents might have something to do with the roots of human culture.
This despite the fact that the first religious symbols are fecund and even bleeding women.  There is in addition the ‘negative evidence’, the widespread menstrual and childbirth taboos that enforce the isolation and demonization of women, the common practice in hunter-gatherer cultures of ‘male menstruation’, and the paranoid stories of women as oppressors who ‘had the power but abused it.’ Rather than looking at the content of these stories, Levi Strauss’s ‘structuralism’ insists that the only important thing to be learned from myth is that a ‘universal structure’ of binary pairs can be perceived (wet/dry, raw/cooked, light/dark), and this points to some mystery of the human brain.  There are even testimonies from males themselves like the one I quoted at the start which anthropologists have disrespectfully ignored. “Women’s business” was in all likelihood the regulation of communal and ritual life through what Knight calls ‘the sex strike.’
Levi-Strauss of course held a different view:

“So it is as periodic creatures that women are in danger of disrupting the orderly working of the universe. Their social insubordination often referred to in the myths, as an anticipation in the form of the ‘reign of women’ of the infinitely more serious danger of their physiological insubordination. Therefore women have to be subjected to regles. And the rules instilled into them by their upbringing, like those imposed on them, even at the cost of their subjection, by a social order willed and evolved by men, are the pledge and symbol of other ‘rules’, the physiological nature of which bears witness to the correspondence between social and cosmic rhythms.” (quoted in Knight, 511)

Levi-Strauss assumed that the first rules arose from the male attempt to rein in the ‘disruptive’ tendencies of women, that the move towards human culture had to be a move away from ‘ungovernable nature,’ embodied by females. It really has to be asked what would suddenly cause males to master their impulses and become inspired to give their females away in hopes of future reciprocity from other males. Is it the deep-seated human capitalistic instinct, the urge to commodities-trading and speculation? And what would explain the “own-kill” rule?

“When sex is used not just reproductively but politically—as a way of negotiating one’s way through a conflict-ridden political landscape, or as a way of acquiring privileges or food—then this results in selection pressures placing sex increasingly under cortical rather than hormonal control.” (532)

This is, in a nutshell, the ‘human revolution.’ Certainly, it is not males who would have to organize themselves to acquire privilege and food.

“Since mothers and their offspring must always have been the main beneficiaries of the ‘own-kill’ taboo, since men probably had no ‘natural’
(as opposed to cultural) inclination to abide by it, and since men’s rewards for compliance appear to have been overwhelmingly marital and sexual- avoiding one’s own kill must in some sense have been motivated and established by women.”  (124)

The own-kill rule points to a very profound concept which to this day regulates economic life in all hunter-gatherer traditions. One’s own flesh, meat, blood, are associated with one’s self, one’s essence. Your self does not exist for you. “It is for others to enjoy.” (108 ) In the vastly later development of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as in widespread mystical traditions, the problem of the ego, or personal self, is seen as the primary stumbling block to spiritual development. It is interesting that, among those who are perceived as the most ‘primitive’ and ‘backwards’ among us, the same issue was recognized and so realistically reconciled, woven into the fabric of daily life and conduct rather than being left to a few eccentric ‘mystics.’

[Rootsie]

“…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)

We are so very fond in the West of our myth of ‘progress.’ It has allowed us to disregard or forget our roots, running roughshod over the history of the past thousand years, formulating a vast ideological and religious construct featuring us as the great white saviors of the world, on top because of our self-evident superiority. In the capitalist worldview, there always have to be winners and losers, and the losers are invariably seen as those who just can’t get with the program. How disconcerting it is to entertain the possibility that there are precious lessons to be learned from our distant past, lessons that hold keys to our survival.

The Rainbow Snake

“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)

Knight spends a good deal of Blood Relations closely considering the Australian Aboriginal creation story of the Rainbow Serpent. With little variation across the continent, the story concerns itself with the two Wawilak Sisters whose synchronous bleeding attracts the attention of an immense serpent, who devours and then regurgitates them. This is viewed as the very first initiatory journey into the spiritual realms, or ‘the Dreamtime.’ It marks the beginning of human culture. Knight notes the prevalence of similar stories across the globe, including the Egyptian one of the underworld serpent Apophis. Each sojourning soul must pass through the body of the serpent in order to reach a state of spiritual reconcilement within the realm of Osiris and become ‘god man’ and ‘god woman.’ The womb-like, vagina-like properties of this serpent-being are undeniable.

“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)

This story forms the uniting core of Aboriginal ritual life. It is reenacted again and again, and without exception, it is reenacted by males. Despite the fact that initiated males are the first to admit that this Snake business is ‘women’s business,’ woman is deliberately excluded from these mysteries, and the instructions she is given seem “precise mirror-image inversions” (469)  of the ‘insider information’:

“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)

In place of solidarity, female segregation and seclusion are the rule. Initiated males know that the Rainbow is females’ kin. “To be engulfed by its power would have been to feel an immense sense of kinship solidarity and strength,” (469) a solidarity and strength males experience in initiation rituals “designed to sustain the reproductivity of both human and natural realms,” (470) in which men cut themselves and one another and shed large amounts of blood. As with the story from the Amazon I opened with, one feels oneself in the presence of an elaborate ‘cover story,’ designed to disempower, separate, and marginalize females. The very existence of such stories and the extreme prohibitions around menstrual blood suggest at the very least a deep “charge’ around the issue of female power. To Knight this constitutes evidence of an earlier time when, if we take these very same males at their word, females were acknowledged as the originators and sustainers of ritual life just as they were revered as the sources of human life itself.

Knight describes

“…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)

There is deep tragedy in this, generations of sons born to women who grow to keep secrets from their mothers, even to despise them and see them as less.

“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)

Knight convincingly cites the far later ‘patriarchal foundation myths—Perseus and Andromeda, Hercules and the Hydra [Medusa], Zeus and Typhon, Marduk and Tiamat, Indra and Vritra, St. George and the Dragon’ (491)—and I would add Adam, Eve, and the Serpent and even St. Patrick, as echoes down the ages of the ‘victory’ males won over female power.

“…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)

Monogamous marriage is another of those capitalist institutions that anthropologists have needed to celebrate as the most primary and basic human configuration. The sex-strike theory suggests that the kinship ties which are so much emphasized during ‘wet’ times are more important in the grand order of things than marriage. Collective values always trump individual ones in hunter-gatherer groups.

“ [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)

Knight’s book suggests that the counterforce to male domination is a female solidarity that leads not to female dominance, but to a social order that gives primacy to the nurturance of the young and the well-being of the collective. Those of us who find solace and encouragement in those most-ancient images of fat and fertile earth goddesses do not imagine a time in the past when females had the upper hand. We simply hope instead that they emblemize a moment in our history when female power and beauty were revered rather than reviled. We hope that there were communitarian times in our past when females were viewed as partners to males. The viciousness of female oppression may well be a sustained and violent backlash against a time when the rhythms of women dictated the rhythms of daily and of ritual life. The matrilineal and matrifocal organization of hunter-gatherer societies may be another vestige of such a time.

“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)

Even the images of the ancient goddesses are emblems of our loss and impoverishment, an intense human disempowerment for which our world suffers so profoundly. The despoiling of the earth, the endless wars to which fathers sacrifice their sons, centuries of racism, imperialism, colonialism…can all of these be laid at the door of a radical imbalance between the sexes? Well, it is difficult to imagine a more redemptive idea than ‘your self is not for you.’ If, as Knight submits, male appropriation of female power accounts for its virtual disappearance from our modern discourse, then indeed gender imbalance can be seen as at least one indicator of how badly we have lost our way

But we don’t need a new story to lead us out of our mess, it seems. We just need remember the oldest story there is.

“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)

Sources:
Gould, Stephen Jay  The Mismeasure of Man.  W.W. Norton. 1996
Knight, Chris. Blood Relations:Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. Yale University Press. 1991.
Oppenheimer, Stephen.  The Journey of Mankind:The Peopling of the World http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

[three_sixty]

the following is a reasoning(from the Rastafari Speaks Interactive forum) that involves some of the topics touched upon in this book review. i am posting it as an inlet into the deeper aspects of these issues that are pulsing at the heart of the paradigm we find ourselves in.

Original can be found at:

http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/community/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=135

Muntu
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Joined: May 01, 2005
Posts: 1

Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 5:00 pm    Post subject: Bible and Africa(Aethiopia, Egypt,Kush, Koush...)  

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When I read the bible I can't see anything about Europe and its traditions. African's traditions are more close to the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob than Caucasian's traditions. Europeans pretend that they had brought this God to us.
When I read:
Genesis15:18-21, Genesis17:9-11, Deutoronomy30:6, Romans2:28-29, Romans9:6-8, Isaiah18:1-3,7, Isaiah19:18-25, Zephaniah3:9-11, Matthew21:43, Isaiah55:4-5,......
Those verses are disconcerting.

What do you thing?

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three_sixty
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Joined: May 05, 2005
Posts: 1

Posted: Thu May 05, 2005 10:34 am    Post subject:    

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Greetings.

I would say that there are some definite linkages in Judaism with ancient African customs. At the same time though, there are elements within Judaism which point to it most likely being the result of the co-optation and re-interpretation process of ancient African and black practices that occurred with the invasions of Indo-European and Semitic peoples into the lands of the older black civilizations. Evidence of this process can be found in India(Aryan invasions displacing and subjugating the Sudroid(black indigenous)), Sumer(the original inhabitants were described by the invaders as the "black headed people"), Egypt(the Hyksos invasions). In all of these cases a similar pattern of a stratified, hierarchical, patriarchal and warlike value system is brought to these areas with the invaders. The concept of the division of LIGHT and DARK into an opposing duality is also indicitive of the belief systems of these invaders. Judaism most definitely shows these attributes within its doctrines and this, to me, is indicitive fhat Judaism is a result of an Indo-European/Semetic value system imposed on a basic structure that most likely retains an earlier African element.

The original black civilizations revolved around a matri-focal structure, the invaders brought with them a more patriarchal value system and this necessitated the need to re-interpret the original doctrines of the earlier peoples.

According to Gerald Massey, in regards to the process of the reversal of roles from matri-focal to patriarchal:

"The field of Babylonian Mythology is one vast battle-ground between the early Motherhood and the later Fatherhood--that is, the Mother in space, in the stellar and lunar characters opposed to the later and solar Fatherhood, which became more especially Semite; indeed, where the Akkadians wrote the "female and the male," the Semite translators prepensely reverse it, and render it by the "male and the female." (The Hebrew and Other Creations)



Furthermore, this process also involved the subjugation of the original black peoples in these lands that were overtaken and this is reflected in the mythologies which evolved.

"As the black race was first on earth, so is it in the mirror of mythology. These are the "people of the black heads," who are referred to on the tablets, and classed with reptiles, during a lunar eclipse. These typical black heads were the primeval powers of darkness, to which the old black aborigines in various lands were likened or assimilated by their despisers. In the Babylonian prayers we find the many-named mother-goddess is invoked as "the mother who has begotten the black heads." These at times were intentionally confused and confounded with their elemental prototypes. Seven such races are described in the Bundahish, or aboriginal creation, as the earth-men, the men of the water, the breast-eared, the breast-eyed, the one-legged, the bat-men, and the men with tails. These were the soulless people. They are also referred to by Esdras as the other people who are nothing, "but be like unto spittle"--that is, when compared with those who descended from the father, as Adam, or Atum, on earth, and who worshipped a father, as Atum, or Jehovah, in heaven." (ibid.)

It is my opinion that Judaism has as its blueprint the doctrines of the re-interpreted mythologies which evolved as a result of this process, which would explain both the African element within its doctrines, and also would explain the patriarchal and dualistic elements from the Semetic and Aryan influence.

Evidence of African practices within Judaism:

Circumcision:
"the Colchians, Egyptians, and Ethiopians alone of all the races of men have practised circumcision from the first. The Phenicians and the Syrians who dwell in Pal
estine confess themselves that they have learnt it from the Egyptians, and the Syrians about the river Thermodon and the river Parthenios, and the Macronians, who are their neighbours, say that they have learnt it lately from the Colchians. These are the only races of men who practise circumcision, and these evidently practise it in the same manner as the Egyptians. Of the Egyptians themselves however and the Ethiopians, I am not able to say which learnt from the other, for undoubtedly it is a most ancient custom; but that the other nations learnt it by intercourse with the Egyptians, this among others is to me a strong proof, namely that those of the Phenicians who have intercourse with Hellas cease to follow the example of the Egyptians in this matter, and do not circumcise their children."
(Herodotus, The Histories, Book II: 104)

Kosher Dietary laws:
Nabta became a habitable area because of a climatic change that occurred over North Africa around 12,000 years ago. This climatic change was caused by a northward shift of the summer monsoons. This shift brought enough rain to the Nabta region to enable it to sustain life for both humans and animals. Although it was a small amount of rain, usually around four to eight inches (10-15 cm) per year, it was enough to fill the playas with water for months at a time. Between 11,000 and 9,300 years ago, Nabta saw its first settlements. The people living at Nabta herded cattle, made ceramic vessels, and set up seasonal camps around the playa. These people regarded cattle in much the same way as modern peoples of West Africa regard them. The blood and milk of the cattle was more significant than the meat.

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/sites/africa/nabtaplaya.html