Consequently, ritually-potent men must prove themselves guardians of the sacred blood. They must abstain from sex and “menstruate” in synchrony with one another, turning the traditional menstrual sex-strike against women themselves.
Chris Knight: Did Matriarchy Ever Exist? 25 September 2018
The law of distribution–it will be suggested–was in the first instance feminine inspired. Codified in a language of blood, it first “stepped in between
production and consumption” in the form of the “own kill” rule, and in doing so established the cultural realm
"Men hunted and killed an animal. Parts of the meat were covered in blood. To the extent that blood as such had been established as indicating non-availability, this meant that the animals were in effect marking themselves as unavailable for consumption. The meat had to be taken back to the home base–to the cooking fire (see below)–before it could be released from the taboo. At this point, it came into contact with the female sex. The heat and flames removed all visible blood, so that the flesh became available for the first time (rather as women emerging from menstrual seclusion become available)."
menstrual synchrony were a factor of importance in Ice Age cultures, we might expect to find indications including (a) special symbolic significance attached to the colour red; (b) a concentration of symbolic attention upon the human female reproductive organs and (c) evidence that time was structured by the periodicity of the moon. Damage would be done to the hypothesis if it could be shown that red was no more important than any other colour, that the female reproductive organs were no more important than the male, and/or that the moon was no more important than the sun or any other celestial body in regulating the periodicity of the ritual calendar. In fact, in all three instances, the reverse is recurrently found to have been the case. Red ochre was of exceptional importance as a symbolic marker almost throughout the Upper Palaeolithic (Leroi-Gourhan 1968: 40; Shimkin 1978: 271; Klein 1969: 226; cf. Flood 1983: 46), female figurines and vulva symbols dominate much of Upper Palaeolithic art (Leroi-Gourhan 1968: 137, 174, 201; Marshack 1972b: 283, 313, 335, 335n; Shimkin 1978: 278) and rhythmic patterns of notches have been found carved on mammoth-tusks and other objects, these having been interpreted as early “calendars” (Leroi-Gourhan 1968: 40), probably lunar (Marshack 1972a, 1972b: 27, 283, 314)."
Two further predictions must follow: (a) they continue to avoid sex until meat is brought home some time later; (b) before the moment of ovulation, the meat should have arrived. This leaves a period of at most fourteen days (and perhaps more realistically ten or so) between the onset of the sex-strike and its end–a period during which a number of tasks must have been accomplished: (1) all adult heterosexual relations must have been severed; (2) preparations for the hunt must have been completed (weapons, traps etc. must have been made, repaired and/or set in place); (3) the hunters must have located and killed prey; (4) meat must have been cut into portable pieces and brought back to a home base, perhaps from a considerable distance.
If women are involved as beaters or to help encircle game, they must still be in seclusion as far as sex is concerned. Towards full moon, when nights are light, the hunt itself gets under way. The closer to full moon, the closer to the most propitious time for killing animals. The animals are killed. Meat is brought home; fires and earth-ovens are prepared; the meat is ceremonially cooked. The killing-to-cooking (blood-to-fire) transition coincides with the transition from waxing to waning moon. Cooking, lunar transition, the removal of blood in meat and the lifting of the blood-spell cast over women are all
symbolised by the same light and fire. The collective, sex-striking community of women and the disciplined hunting-band both now dissolve: from now on comes feasting, celebration and sex.
Secondly, the model provides us with a situation in which game animals and women are “respected” or “avoided” on account of this shared blood. Men avoid their own kills for reasons which, symbolically, are the same as those motivating avoidance of blood-polluted sisters, mothers or wives.
Ritual/speech coevolution: a solution
to the problem of deception
Linguistic signs are related in
an ‘arbitrary’ way to their referents; it is learned convention alone which
links a word with its semantic meaning. Such decoupling of signals from
emotions and associated real-world stimuli renders listeners highly
vulnerable to deception. We would expect ‘Machiavellian’ strategists to
resist signals of this kind, setting up negative selection pressures against
their evolution.
Myths, dramatic performances, art and indeed all expressions of human
symbolic culture may in this light be understood as ‘collusion in
deception’ (Knight, Power & Watts 1995; Rue 1994) — collaboration in
the maintenance of fictions which have social support. Trust in the
founding fictions is not given lightly.
On Darwinian grounds, we would not expect such a message to be
transmissible in whispers or in code. For human females to indicate We
are males!, We are animals! and Anyway, we are all menstruating! is on
one level absurd and implausible. The target audience of outgroup males
will have no interest in collusion with such a collective fantasy. To
overcome listener-resistance, signallers will therefore have to resort to the
most explicit, loud and spectacular body-language possible. A costly,
multimedia, deceptive display is now being staged by an ingroup to
impress and exploit outsiders.
We now have a Darwinian model of the origins of collective deception
through symbolic ritual.
The loud, repetitive signals are patent
fictions. Not only do they fail to match reality — they systematically
reverse it, point by point. But if all are deploying the same fictions, and if
this signalling is internally co-operative, then between group members
there is no reason to expect resistance. Those colluding in emitting the
fictions now have an opportunity to understand one another ‘through’
them. When deployed internally, moreover, pretend-play routines may be
abbreviated and conventionalized. Shorthand portions of pretend-play will
now act as referents, not directly to anything in the external world, but to
recurrent representations within the domain of pretend-play held in
common.
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