In this episode Chris and Danielle explore:

• Exploring menstruation rituals and ceremonies within hunter-gatherer communities

• Significance of the full and new moons in these ceremonies

• Discussing how these ceremonies and rituals were lost over time

• Understanding the connection between menstruation and moon cycles

• Acknowledging the darkness in the lack of equity for women and the taboo around menstruation

• Examining ways to reclaim the power and significance of menstruation in modern society

• Looking at how we can evolve as a species through reconnecting to our womb and embracing our feminine cycles

Traditional healing rituals in many parts of the world seem to derive from a model of cyclical renewal provided in the first instance by menstruation. Health is seen as dependent upon a correct balance between polar opposite states such as ‘heat’ and ‘cold’, ‘dryness’ and ‘wetness’ etc. Nature seems to achieve such balance by alternating regularly between opposites such as night and day, wet season and dry. In this way, periodic ‘death’ (night, winter etc.) alternates with ‘life’.

This thesis presents and tests a new theory of human cultural origins. The point of departure is an economic finding: unlike non-human primates when they engage in hunting, human hunters normatively do not eat their own kills. This apparent self-denial, it is argued, is best seen as an expression of a cultural universal, the sexual division of labour, in which women obtain meat which their sexual partners have secured. It is suggested that the female sex may have played a part in the establishment of this arrangement, and – in particular – that menstrual bleeding may have been central to its symbolic underpinnings.

THE ORIGINS OF SOCIETY was written in 1988, three years before the publication of my Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture. It still provides a good basic outline of my argument. With hindsight, this rendering appears to me as one of several early "mythical" versions of my story – although by no means the worst of these. Scientifically speaking, it is now somewhat out of date. Thanks largely to the work of Ian Watts, it is now known that the human revolution occurred well before the Europe Upper Palaeolithic, and that the location (almost certainly) was sub-Saharan Africa. In the light of this knowledge, this pamphlet’s many references to "the Ice Age" no longer seem very appropriate. Writing today, I would also amend my style of argumentation, which in this pamphlet is hardly Darwinian. Shortly after Blood Relations was published, Camilla Power recast the theory in more rigorously Darwinian ("selfish gene") terms, making it rather more persuasive to scientists working in this field. Despite these shortcomings, I have found that newcomers to the whole topic appreciate the brevity and conceptual simplicity of this particular version, so it seemed worthwhile to reprint it in the form in which it was written.

In much Native American mythology marriage is conceptualized as a monthly honeymoon interrupted at each dark moon by menstruation. Woman’s monthly alternation between marital sex and menstrual seclusion is coded as an alternation between her rival partners, Sun and Moon. Against this background, a Plains Indian myth attempts to come to terms with a novel problem. With the introduction of patrilocal residence, a woman must stay with her husband and his relatives even when she is menstruating. It is as if her two rival partners, instead of living apart, had come to occupy the same space together, limiting her movement and precluding her escape. Such permanency in marriage, overriding menstrual periodicity is experienced as a dangerous violation of ritual norms. Exploring the consequent difficulties and contradictions, the myth finds a way of validating the new arrangement. This story along with many others analysed by Lévi- Strauss analysis in the light of his own ‘exchange of women’ theory of human cultural origins. Re-analysed in the light of menstrual sex-strike theory however, it makes good sense, shedding light on the origins of women’s oppression.

Over much of Aboriginal Australia men exercise ritual power through ceremonies (stated in myths once to have been the prerogative of women) in which they symbolically “menstruate” and “give birth.” The resultant power is conceptualized as a rainbowlike snake, which is said to be the source of life and which “swallows” humans and then “regurgitates” them, now “reborn.” This chapter discusses examples of such rituals and beliefs. It suggests that Australian Aboriginal culture in certain regions exhibits a phenomenon known in Western medical science as “menstrual synchrony,” and that such synchrony has been conceptualized traditionally as “like a rainbow” and “like a snake.”