Menstruation As Medicine

Soc. Sci. Med. Vol. 21, No. 6, pp. 671-683, 1985.

M ENSTRUATION AS MEDICINE
CHRIS KNIGHT
Department of Anthropology, University College London, London WCI, England
Abstract – 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 betweenpolar 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’. The logic of healing rites is that humans, too, should be able to move through ‘death’ to ‘new life’ by keepingclosely in tune with wider rhythms of renewal. It is argued here that ideally, women should achieve this by menstruating in synchrony with the moon,
which periodically ‘dies’ and is ‘reborn’. Failing this – runs the traditional logic – men themselves must learn to ‘menstruate’ in some symbolic sense in
order to safeguard the rhythms of renewal.

I NTRODUCTION
In this paper it will be suggestedthat shamanistic healing powers derive widely, and perhaps universally, from a model of cyclical renewal
provided in the first instance by menstruation*. Using evidence mainly from California, Amazonia and northern and north-western Australia, I
will argue that the cultural assumptions underlying shamanism or ‘medicine’ in these areas run roughly as follows:
(1) health is dependent uponthe maintenance of a correct ‘balance’ between states or forces such as heat and cold, wetness and dryness, blood and fire,
kinship unity and sex, or ‘rawness’ and the state of being ‘cooked’ – forces, that is, which are conceptualised as polar opposites of the kind which make up
the structure of the world;
(2) nature achieves her own health by alternating in a balanced way between theseopposites – as between dry season and wet, full moon and dark, day and
night, life and temporary or periodic ‘death’;
(3) the health of the human individual presupposes the ability correctly to reduplicate, within the body itself, these rhythms of periodic renewal;
(4) ideally, women should do this by menstruating in synchrony with one another and with the moon, thus providing a collectivesocial rhythm through
which human society can keep ‘in phase’ with the self-renewing processes of the wider cosmos;
(5) failing this, men themselves must learn to ‘menstruate’ in some symbolic sense in order to safeguard the rhythms on which human health depends.

T HE ORIGIN OF MORTALITY
Australian Aboriginal myths insistently assert that the finality of death became instituted only whenhumanity failed to respond properly to the
moon. Before that time, death had been only temporary – followed by moon-like resurrection after three or four days. Warner [1] gives a Murngin
myth in this vein. In the far-off dreamtiine the Moon and the Parrot Fish had an argument about which was the best way to die. The Moon
decided on temporary death followed by resurrection, but the ParrotFish insisted that this was wrong. The narrator ends his story with the
following comment:
When the Moon had had his conversation with Parrot Fish he had wanted Parrot Fish to be like him. He had said, ‘Come on and become alive again like
me. I can fix you so that you will come alive again.’
‘No’, said Parrot Fish, ‘I want to die and stay dead’.
This is what makes man stay dead and nevercome back to life. The Parrot Fish was a silly fool.

Berndt [2] gives a similar myth from the same general area; in this, the Parrot Fish is replaced by a female Dugong, the conversation between the
two having taken place at a spot known as “the clay pan of the Moonlight”, a stretch of beach along Arnhem Bay “outstandingly related to the
Moon, his death and his subsequent rebirth”....