Review by David Holt, The Guild of Pastoral Psychology

David Holt, The Guild of Pastoral Psychology

I heard of (Blood Relations) first in a review in the TLS of 7 February, 1992, by Peter Redgrove, who hailed it as a companion to his The Wise Wound, which he had co-authored with Penelope Shuttle in 1978. Redgrove described Blood Relations as “a magnificent work of materialistic science constructed from anthropological field work and tribal myth”, as compared to The Wise Wound, in which “we derived our ideas mostly from contemporary studies and dreams, and spoke as poets exploring aspects of the inner world of the menstrual cycle, its shared subjectivity”. And he went on: “Despite their different methods, neither book contradicts the other; indeed they seem to meet … in Knight’s triumphantly humanistic axiom: Magic for everybody, but no gods”.

There was much more in Redgrove’s review to excite my interest. When I got hold of a copy of Knight’s book I found that it was all the review had promised. I want to give you a brief summary of its argument, and to then say something about how it affected me.

Chris Knight is reconstructing a human revolution that occurred 70 to 50 thousand years ago. He argues that evolving ice age women learned to synchronise their menstrual cycle so as to exercise control over men both as hunters, food providers, and as sexual partners. Hunting, killing and sexuality were jointly regulated by women synchronising their menstruation. This was the beginning of human culture as we know it.

In his book we are standing as it were on a threshold between evolution and history. The synchronising of menstruation explains the appearance of new human characteristics. Not only the distinctive features of human female reproductive physiology but other features of both sexes, such as large brain size, reduced sexual dimorphism, and increased gracility, were all a result. A mating system based on female synchrony minimised the selective value of violence, maximised that of more co-operative social and communicative skills. This shift in selection pressures was the most important factor underlying the transition to anatomical modernity.

Mating systems of this kind involved the formation of unusually strong and enduring coalitions. Such systems were complex and intellectually demanding, particularly with regard to time awareness. This linkage of big game hunting timed by generalised ovarian/menstrual synchrony spread from African shoreline settings into ice age hinterland conditions during the Upper Palaeolithic revolution. The new logic then reached take-off point, and began to spread irresistibly across the globe, probably around 45,000 years ago.

Selection pressures in favour 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 in 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. (And here Knight refers to René Girard’s book Violence and the Sacred.) The result was a blood-centred symbolic system which linked game animals and the female body into a tightly integrated web of meanings in Early Upper Palaeolithic art. These included periodic notation systems, the use of ochre as a blood substitute, the recurrent association of vulva engravings with those of animals, figurines which emphasise the female reproductive organs, and more generally, the art’s suggestively lunar/menstrual as well as seasonal or ‘time-factored’ internal logic.

So to understand the ‘leap’ to symbolic culture in which history has its beginning we have to think of menstrual synchronisation as bringing domesticity, extended and formalised kinship, fire, the division of labour, sexual taboos, hunting and meat cooking, into one time conscious sexual-symbolic system.

That is Knight’s argument, as he summarises it half way through the book, at the beginning of Chapter 9. Whether it is true or not I am not qualified to judge. But what I want to convey here is not so much the argument of this magnificent book as the excitement it caused me. So let me read to you the opening of a long letter, full of questions and differences, which I wrote to the author shortly after my first reading:

I feel you have presented me with an opportunity to speak person to person about things which have been bugging me all my life. As what I have to say is a lot about differences, let me begin by recording the quite extraordinary sense of homecoming and comradeship which the book has for me. I have on occasion felt almost sick with excitement, but also relief, such relief: a release of tension as if I am at last in the presence of an understanding which allows something hard and knotted and perverse and intrinsically unshareable, to unfold, stretch, breath. In talking about difference I want to give expression to that feeling. To which end it is important to note that the excitement, both hormonal and cortical, has been such that I do not expect to be able to ‘fix’ it. It may well be that there is something at stake here which will have to wait until after I am gone.

What was it that so excited me?

It was the link between sex and time. For thirty years or more I’ve been haunted by the conviction that there is some quite simple link between sex and time which we are struggling to remember, or perhaps to discover ‘for the first time’. In my paper Alchemy and Psychosis: Curiosity and the Metaphysics of Time I spoke of the overlap of three different ‘time scales’ or ‘timings’: the time of my personal life, the time of history, and the time of evolution. Knight’s reconstruction of the threshold between evolution and history excites me because it assumes such an overlap. It assumes it by incorporating hunger into a more comprehensive ethno-ontology. First, there is sexual rhythm. Then there is the use of that rhythm to enforce and control hunting and killing for food. Then there is the thought of culture, history, time itself in so far as history is time, as originating in that enforcement. Together they speak into something congested and overdetermined in my experience which I have never been able to unpack. The release of tension as I read page after page of the detailed, passionate and ironic argument was extraordinary, and something for which I still feel great waves of gratitude.

But now, with reference to our Bible: does the memory of some such original event lie behind the stories collected together in the early chapters of Genesis? How is my reading of the Jacob Esau story affected if I allow myself the excitement released by Chris Knight’s book? And not only the Jacob and Esau story: Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve, and perhaps most pregnant of all with the Eucharist in mind, the blessing of Abraham and his seed when he has shown himself willing to feed his only son to God:

By myself have I sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you, and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand on the seashore. And your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies, and all nations on earth shall pray to be blessed as your descendants are blessed, and this because you have obeyed me.

How is that blessing of agnatic blood related to the supply of food? Where are the breasts that can satisfy the seed which is to be like the sand upon the seashore? There has to be some balance, some reciprocity, between food and sex. The question who, or what, controls that balance is crucial to any ethno-ontology. Where in the ethno-ontology of Genesis is that control located?

I think the stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Adam and Eve, are telling us something about the acceleration of hunger. But, as people have been saying for two hundred years and more, they have to be read against earlier traditions. Genesis locates control of the balance between sex and food with God. If Chris Knight’s argument is to be believed there was a much earlier time when that control was not only located with women but actually dreamed up ¬by women. Genesis says that God’s control of the balance between sex and food underwrites the purpose of history. Knight’s argument is that history began when women dreamed up a specifically human way of balancing food and sex against each other. That’s quite a difference. We need to explore that difference if we are to understand the Bible’s contribution to the acceleration of hunger.