II. Evolution and Meaning.

Just as our physiology developed as a means to survive in the environment we found ourselves millions of years ago, so too human culture began and evolved out of beliefs that certain rituals are essential for survival. The feeling that life has purpose or meaning is far more a function of ritualized social behavior than the conceptual AWAREness intellectuals are inclined to deify. So even when one is conceptually faced with self-destructive behavior, the ritual may not change as any NOCIRC activist will attest.

 Gender superficial but influential.  One characteristic found in all early theories of reality and nearly universal yet today, is the role of gender. Even though gender, from a sophisticated philosophical point of view, is a superficial aspect of existence, people have taken it to be a universal part of reality as far back as archeological evidence gives clues to the human mind. Most things in human experience, including humans themselves, were male or female. Generalizing on this experience, gender was applied to things not obviously gendered, like mountains, bodies of water and ships upon that water.

  III. Origin Metaphors Based in Menstruation.

Female perspective.  What might have been those earliest ritualized metaphors that gave a sense of order, purpose and understanding to creatures hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, years ago? What environmental forces were so unavoidably familiar and startling they ritualized behavior long before that behavior was in AWAREness? The wealth of recent scholarship emphasizing the female role in human development has brought a new perspective to such questions.

Menstrual blood unavoidable.  Judy Grahn points out that blood may have been the most important and also the most dangerous substance people faced (GJ). And face it we must, and especially, face it she must. Women bleed. Women bleed naturally. Their blood flows from their genitals. A woman is a flow-er. This unavoidable biological fact and its inevitable consequences are the basis for the best and the worst in human culture, for the origin of human culture itself, if Grahn’s provocative thesis is true.

Blood and predators.  Myths often combine the origin of menstruation and the world by saying a canine or feline predator was responsible for both. The Maya had their Jaguar; North American Indians their Coyote; the ancient Egyptians their Jackal. They rip flesh, draw blood. Predators are in stories relating birth and its fluids to menstrual blood. They also make solid ground as Coyote did by bringing dirt up from beneath the primeval waters (EO 88).

Blood as life.  The origin of our fixation on blood is not so much related to the kill of the hunt as it is with blood we involuntarily shed, either naturally with no loss or threat to life, or traumatically when wounded or killed. Eventually, natural bleeding was discovered to be necessary for life. Blood was even said to be the stuff of life, since retained menstrual blood was believed to coagulate into the fetus itself, just as the heavenly bodies were curds and clots of mother nature’s milk and blood.

Appropriate behavior as ritual.  Those who changed their behavior, instinctually or culturally, to minimize the danger reproduced more than those who didn’t. Ritual is simply appropriate behavior or behavior believed to be appropriate. Inappropriate behavior is not just dissocial, irreligious, or naughty. Originally it was life-threatening. When individuals presented a danger to their group, such behavior, even when it was biologically necessary, had to be severely controlled. A person endangering the group can either be ostracized or confined to protect the group. Learning self-control through ritual stands at the divide between instinct and AWAREness, just as the meaning of “AWAREness” itself divides between physical and conceptual concern.

Menstruation and the moon.  Not only did our ancestors discover a connection between predation and menstruation, but also between menstruation and the cyclical rhythms of the sky. Ancient peoples were obsessed with astronomical measurements. Among the daily rhythms and the yearly cycles, among the random events of sunshine and storm, was the moon’s regular waxing and waning coincident with female menstrual cycles.

Moon people, moon cognates.  “Moon,” “month,” “mother,” “mouth,” “menstruation,” “measurement” “math,” “matter,” “mammaries,” and even “man” which is still pronounced more like “moon” in some dialects, are linguistic cognates testifying to a common source. Humans first defined themselves as “moon people,” as creatures who saw in the moon a basic metaphor defining who they were. The linkage of these words presents the metaphorical link between human physiology and cosmogony. If menstrual blood and birth are linked, then when menstrual blood and moon are linked, cosmic origin and birth are linked. Birth, an exclusively female function, gives life to us and the cosmos.

Coincidence as control.  Coincidence is never mere coincidence to the emerging superstitious mind. The menstruating female was not just coincidentally in step with the rhythms of the world. She and the world were in reciprocal control. Since woman’s blood was powerful, she was powerful, powerful enough to alter nature’s course. Power is dangerous as well as wondrous. Everything about her was charged. Her body became a metaphor for the world (GJ).

Body as microcosm.  Her actions were mirrored in the world, as the world was mirrored in her. Her body fluids, tears, spit, milk, blood and urine, were the fluids of the world. We are affected by things around us, but those most powerful among us can cause things in the world to change.

The affect the menstruant could have on the world was probably felt to be at first, like all superstitions or sympathetic magic, just the way the world works. We just “know” that stepping on cracks breaks backs; we don’t need a theory as to how or why. No cosmic gods or goddesses need exist to please or to anger, though they have been feared now for millennia. Causality in reality was seen as a two-way street. Storms affect us, but combing her hair could cause storms, a superstition believed by clergy into the 17th century (W 368).

Gaining control of self and cosmos.  Grahn and Bryk marshal evidence from anthropology and mythology to show how cultures have treated the menstruant, especially during her first bleedings. Since her skin was the earth’s surface, a surface all too unstable, as our California friends know too well, she could not be allowed to scratch herself. To scratch open her skin would cause the earth to open. Neither could she look at the light nor touch the ground so she was elevated on a chair, bed or platform shoes. She could only drink water from a straw, and could not even move for days or weeks. She could not touch her blood to clean herself. She might be whipped with nettles. All this suffering she had to endure for the welfare of the clan. She was put through a ritual she could never forget. She was made AWARE.

These behaviors reflect the extreme of not wanting to step on the crack that breaks mother’s back. Mother is the mother of all life, the collective cosmic mother who is both caring and threatening. She gives birth to her children from the blood-water of her womb, nurtures reality with the various saps from her breast and takes us back (despite our wishes) into her dark, but regenerating tomb-womb.

The “world” saved from the flood refers to the conceptual scheme generated to understand our place in the world, our ultimate orientation or “east-bearing.” Our conceptual insights are always in danger of being lost in the flood of unconsciousness. But Innana’s Boat of Heaven (also known as “her well-praised vulva” and the crescent moon) rides out the high water. She keeps her orientation since she possesses the menstrual laws, the basic insights needed to understand and orient life, and delivers to her people her cargo of laws that hold heaven and earth together (WK, GJ 214). The world, apart from a philosophy, is mere chaos. It is the dream-time before the beginning.

IV. Man’s Place in a Woman’s World.

Cosmetics and cosmology.  These behaviors, focused around the female’s blood flow and its dangers, were the beginnings of cosmetics. Altering our body affects the world around us. The prostitute, originally a function of the priestess whose body was man’s connection to the divine, still signals with her make-up and dress, as we all do in our own way. Grahn suggests the need for tools, clothes and shelter, the cosmetic items of culture, developed from the proscriptions placed on women in their menstrual isolation .

As a cosmologist, I wondered what possible connection cosmetology could have with cosmology. The connection is between the well-ordered body and the well-ordered structure of the universe (GJ). They are not disconnected and parallel orderings. One’s body rituals were thought to order the cosmos, to hold it in place so life is possible. Suicide is common when one’s body cannot alter events to make life meaningful. Life without friends or lovers, an ostracized or uninfluential life, is not possible.

Ritual as conceptualization.  What is held in place by rituals is the conceptual framework that interprets the world for us. Body modification and control is the first control we have. If we change our mood, or our vulnerability, we believe we will change the actions of mother nature, just as we change the actions of our biological mother by our appropriate behavior when we are pleased or discomforted. The metaphors which gave us the genesis of the cosmos or uni-verse, that is, genetic cosmology or cosmogony, were extensions of human genital functions. “Uni,” one name for the unifying triple goddess, actually comes from Sanskrit “yoni,” the vulva as source of reality, symbolized by the fleur-de-lis and the dove (W 543). Not all genitals were created equal. The genitals that had what it took, that had “the right stuff,” were female genitals.

Blood, kin and power.  The menstruating woman with her power for construction or destruction, with her aura of control and her direct connection to cosmic forces by way of the moon, became the focus of the group. Her blood was the unity of the group, what made them kin. Even in an age of genetics we speak of being of the same blood. Her centrality developed into the powers we now call priestess and queen. As patriarchy developed, the queen became the king, though not at first with anything like absolute power. The phantom ideal of later ages was to unite again the power of priestess and queen, but then under a kin source who was a male, a divinely commissioned king. This king was the stand-in for a God whose changeless kingdom was eventually conceived to be safer outside the changing cosmos.

Cosmetic surgery for cosmological knowledge.  But only those who bleed, especially genitally, can have the knowledge, can express the sacred rituals of power. Just as females had to alter or control their bodies to control the world, so men had to alter their bodies to become part of the sacred cycle.

Ritual male genital bleeding was, as most circumcisers say today, cosmetic surgery. It was not cosmetic in the sense of “unnecessary.” It was cosmetic because circumcision was necessary to gain and maintain cosmological knowledge and power. This cosmological knowledge, incarnated cosmetically with the knife, explained the mysteries of the cosmos. Men became privy to the first philosophical cosmogony describing the meaning and origin of reality through the sacred genital ritual. This knowledge of the sacred mysteries, though mostly subliminal, included the power to create, the power to generate and give birth to the blood stored as a fetus in the womb for nine moons.

I feel millennia melt away as I talk to those who know circumcision is cosmetic, but still believe it must be done. Some people also know that circumcision is not valid if the wound does not bleed. Others say the pain is necessary.

Righting rites of genital blood.  Male circumcision, as we know it, almost certainly was not the original male rite that righted his wrong organs. Complete amputation of the foreskin began during the second century to prevent Jews from hiding their heritage (B, ERE). Nicking or pricking the organ to make it bleed was probably sufficient. A later theory, incorporating a purpose for men, said the pricking of the female (perhaps the tearing of her vaginal veil) by the male, caused the onset of female bleeding and fertility.

However, the prevalence of eunuchs in historical times, probably meant that many males went so far as to completely cut off their inappropriate genitals to show complete dedication to their divinity (W, Cybele). Eunuchs likely existed in pre-patriarchal times as a way to find favor as males in the priestess profession. If only Lorena Bobbitt had lived in an earlier time, she might have found gainful employment! As patriarchy developed, men not only took on, but eventually took over, the priestess’ duties, but even then they often did so without their genitals, or at least without being sanctioned to use them (TR 136). The priest-king’s attire originally signaled the male to be acceptable in a women’s profession as a transvestite, a transition state from female to male power (W 503)

 Male power from female grace.  Other rites developed that focused attention on men’s genitals. Because women were less mobile with child-bearing and caring responsibilities, they were more likely to settle down and claim land. This eventually gave them economic power as agriculture developed in Neolithic times. Men could then only gain power and prestige as landlords as a consort of the female (W, Kingship). The need for hunting for food was declining and the so too the glory men acquired by hunting, and hunting each other in war was just catching on. Abraham’s power, for example, came from Sarah who, as a Mesopotamian priestess not allowed to have children, took him as her consort rather than being his barren wife, according to Savina Teubal’s analysis (T).

Mating, contrary to a common presumption of marriage since patriarchal times, did not give a man unlimited access to his wife, and she had no obligation to mate with him for life. As agriculture developed, its cycles of growth and decay, death and rebirth (similar to the waxing, waning, disappearing and re-emerging moon cycles) began to be used as a metaphor to explain the nature of the cosmos and the cycle of human life, death and rebirth. Just as the seed came from mother earth, died when planted in her under-ground, was reborn as it germinated and grew and was sacrificed when eaten or replanted, so too the male was born of a woman, mated with a woman, died as a heroic sacrifice for a (cosmic) woman and was reborn as a male child of a woman.

Eventually, substitutes known as sacred kings were found to satisfy the king’s death ritual (W). These sacred kings found their way into mythologies of the old world societies. Virgin mothers no longer gave birth parthenogenically but required mates. The mate became a mother giving birth to the reborn hero. The mother then assumed the third aspect of her trinity, the death crone, who gathered up, or consumed and gestated the sacred hero, when he was sacrificed. Finally, the sacred king was reborn from the Janus crone-virgin as the cycle was renewed with the male coming from and returning to the female. Later patristic sensitivities required the infant son come from a father creator, being merely incubated in a female, and return to him forever when he died. Some myths even had the gestation take place in the male, in Zeus’ thigh, for example.

The Maya Quetzalcoatal, born of a virgin, gave blood from his penis to re-create the human race after the Flood. As one of the “castrated Fathers,” he was sacrificed, descended into the underworld, rose from the dead and was expected to return to earth. The Europeans beat him to it.

Genital sacrifice as substitute.  The king’s sacrifice, either as a requirement of the hieros gamos or because a younger rival killed him (after castrating him to prevent even his spirit from having retributive power), seems to have been modified to allow the king to live but only at the expense of his genitals, a ritual carried well into historical times. Genital amputation would cause the necessary bleeding and remove any chance he would trivialize his mating with the queen-priestess by mating with lesser women. The king’s acquired holiness dwelt mostly in his genitals since that is his point of contact with the goddess-queen sacred blood. The Neolithic Ice Man, recently discovered in the Alps and dated to 3300 BCE, has no genitals. Could this possibly be one of the “lords who were half woman” as these emasculated men were called (W 146)?

Blessings’ trickle-down.  Likely the first ritual genital mutilations were only done to the male hero as a representative of all males. It may not have been necessary for all males to submit to the knife of the cosmetologist. But just as smoking moved from an occasional act of communion with the divine to a secular activity of the elite and then to a common activity of the population as a whole, just as white flour used by the rich for special occasions came to be the only flour available for the poorest people, so too genital mutilations probably moved out of the province of the most privileged to become a “benefit” for everyone. Social workers and nurses have been known to tell an unwed mother she can bless her son with a circumcision before giving him up for adoption. Perhaps they are carrying on an ancient tradition when women originally did the circumcisions and dispensed the blessings of cosmetic-cosmological AWAREness.

V. Patriarchal Modifications.

Male separatism.  As patriarchy gained a strong foothold in the middle of the first millennium BCE, eunuchs were still in the service of holy orders, but now in male separatist orders like early Buddhism and Pythagoreanism. Even some Christians claimed that cutting off genitals was a godsend since desire for the devil (whose name was “woman”) was diminished (Matt. 19:10-12).

Hierarchical abusers.  Abused people abuse others. Mutilations were still done as a way to tie-into (the root meaning of “religion”) the divine’s favor or his earthly representatives. However, the divine was now male and the ritual took on new meanings. Genital mutilations removed or exposed a male’s most valued body part. This operation demonstrated trust and obedient submission to one’s elders who in many cases took out unbelievable aggression on helpless youth during their initiation hazing. Initiates were told heroic endurance of pain was necessary to become a man (B). Obeying the highest power is still believed by most pious people to be the same as loving him.

Male re-birthing.  Finally, male genital cosmetics were rationalized in a typical patriarchal reversal: It became a sign one has left the woman’s world of one’s birth, rather than an attempt to identify with it. The man’s covenant with his male gods assured him that his re-birth (by way of a male) would be into a male’s world of light that saves him from the female’s world of darkness. Zulu boys wear women’s aprons until the ritual circumcision is over and they have become men (B 268).

Ritual hunting, war and sports.  Male blood rites go far beyond genital bleeding. Even in the deer hunt today, the kill and gutting in the field is more important than any physical sustenance the meat brings, though my deer-hunting friends always offer some ground venison, like a communion offering, to those not fortunate enough to kill the holy flesh themselves. War, of course, is the ultimate high. Only where all is risked, can awe be most awesome, since it could have been most awful. Many games and sports are but diluted versions of full-bodied, heroic blood rites. Other sports are ways of demonstrating skill and control of one’s self and the cosmic stand-in, the ball. Self-control controls the cosmos.

Gender and materialism.  In a female-gendered cosmology only women are made in the image of the divine. The materialistic metaphors men have often used to describe the cosmos is another way men have sought to remove the second-class stigma of being male. However, not only do these metaphors avoid gender, they also treat the cosmos as an “it,” an object, rather than a person. This depersonalization is now having disastrous environmental and spiritual consequences.

 VI. Summary. 

The flow-er.  We are gendered creatures, whose impregnations take place inside the body of the female gender only. The preparations for carrying these fertilized cells internally until they are sufficiently developed to exist on their own includes a blood flow synchronized with the moon’s period. The flow-er and the blood flow was wondrous since it created life, but dangerous since blood attracted predators. As consciousness increased, the relationship between menstrual blood, kinship safety, reproduction and cosmic events became more obvious. The cosmos came from a female, just as humans and other life-forms, and the universe (that is, our AWAREness of it) likewise could sicken and die as other lives do. To decrease the danger to one’s physical and mental map of the cosmos, the menstruant and her kin had to increase control of themselves as their means to control the world. This was done through sympathetic magic. By controlling her body cosmetically, the cosmos was designed, controlled and understood metaphorically.

Men became prickers in trying to become flow-ers. They never truly made it. The vehemence of man’s blood-letting belies a deep anxiety that he is not truly OK. Perhaps more blood is the fix. The male circumcision rituals became parallel rituals that tried to develop their own rationale. Their blood rites were eventually interpreted to support a sexist separatist movement, then a sexist dominance movement called “patriarchy” whose body-penetrating pricking from war and deflowering, to hunting and circumcision, still preoccupies our every thought and action.

Genderless cosmic subject.  The resurgence of cosmic female metaphors may correct the mistake of treating the cosmos as an object, but we have been in that cul de sac before. Gender equality and environmental sanity will only be stabilized when we realize we exist within a genderless, but unsurpassably all-inclusive, living Individual. Humanity’s challenge now to avoid extinction is twofold: (1) to conceive (or re-conceive) the universe as a living reality, but (2) to do so without a gender bias. Our early ancestor’s cosmology was humanity’s greatest achievement, but its gendered basis lies at the root of humanity’s greatest evils.