Menstruation
Menstruation is the fountain of youth, the river of love by which Hera and Aphrodite were rendered virginal and adolescent. Menstruation stands for creative power, and envy of it by artists is evinced everywhere in all myths, a womb envy to counter the muscle envy of women.
To drink the menstual blood of a virgin has long been a rite of creative initiation. Even in the Christian myths, the disciples and Jesus himself are meant to drink the menstrual blood of a virgin, from the lips of the holy grail – and the cup stands for both the heart and the yoni, and wine always for blood. The motif began at the wedding of canaan, in which Mary (Mara = sea) instructs her son to turn water (semen) into wine (menstruation), and which he coldly agrees. He finally drinks the wine himself, and is punished with a snake bite on the ankle, upon the female insignia of the cross.
The desire for virginal menstruation is to avoid ingesting semen, a mythopoetical taboo since the Sumerian myth of the godman Enki who fertilizes the land through river waters of semen, which Ishtar steals to make the eight fruits of knowledge, which he steals, by which he is self-impregnated, and lacking a womb, suffers, until Ishtar takes each of his children from him to her womb, including Ninti, rib-woman, Mother of Life, who is most potent as life because she comes from his rib—that is, from the cup of blood his heart: happy ending or no, it is best to drink from a virgin.
In Genesis, knowledge leads to sweat to achieve bread, and so bread and sweat are one, and the love of woman and suffering for her children in menstruation and birth. Sweat is semen, and blood is egg. Our own idiom has us put “blood and sweat” into the projects we love the most, and together they stand for life. Blood stands for life, for life is a flood, and even the mind is a stream of consciousness. Ocean is blood is woman, and rivers are semen are man.
The ancient gods supped on ambrosia and nectar, and again ambrosia is menstrual blood, and nectar is semen. Perhaps the Soma of the Hindus was from the dung mushroom, which is red, and the context suggests the same awe and terror before the female creative function. The great taboos are put against the holy blood of God. To be washed in blood is to be baptized, and the castrated man is not rendered powerless, but creative, just as a frigid woman also is rigid, has a penis, the inner penis of her soul, for men contain a womanish side, and women a mannish side. Castration and frigidity are empowering and disempowering both – see the full not the partial!
Dionysus was celebrated for turning water to wine, and worshipped through baptisms and drinking the blood of Dionysus; and here the two births suggest being born first as a man, and again as a woman, or the birth of our inner nature.
The rose stands for beauty, for the heart, for the cup, and for the vagina—it is also the flower of beauty and true love.
Vampires are the undead men who have gained the charms of death, having passed to the occult world of magic, and come back to seduce virginal women to drink their (mentrual) blood—and that is the whole charm of them. Odin also died as a sacrifice to himself, hanging from the world tree and balancing on the pierce of the spear Gungnir—the frictionless spear of his penis-consciousness, the irrestiable spear of penetration—and yet riding the world tree, that is, Goddess All, is as sexual as riding a horse.
Blood stands for race and genes, as a family is of one blood. The downfall of a generation of gods at ragnorak comes ultimately from mixing bloods of allfather with the beautiful giant Loki, whose children in turn have enough God and enough Giant to overturn the world.
The apocalypse says the bloody moon is the end of the world, but the moon is the moonstruator, the ebber of the bloody sea, and a bloody moon is doubling what the moon is, the cycling of woman. The moon is always bloody: we call that tide.
Therefore, as the serpant is the castrated masculinity of woman, or really, the aggressive part of her that she supresses, and lives in her womb, so too does Leviathan, Whale, Moby Dick, Midgard Serpant; sailors call her tempestuous, and peaceful. Pacific and belligerant. Thor who is Jove who is Yahweh fights the midgard serpant, the original motif is Tiamat, mother of life, against Marduk her grandson, and therefore An and El are the first fathers (sun and Saturn); and though the Bible has Yahweh boast of his control of Leviathan, yet a great number of dragons destroy heaven and earth by the end of the Bible. Odin opposes the Fenrir wolf, and this is the womb itself.
Ash is the tree of regeneration, and the first man was named Ash, and his wife Vine. The grape and wine are ever women, intoxication, life, blood, and menstruation. Ash if the first man, Ash is the world tree, Ash is the ark in which humanity survives the end of the world.
Odin dies to gain occult powers of interpretation and magic, and comes back. But to speak poetry, he must drink the blooded mead of Kvasar, hidden like menstruation in the belly of mother mountain. There he loves the giantess who protects it—giants stand for the terribleness of nature—and their child in turn is the god of poetry, and be taking the mead, Odin grows the womb of poetry, the menstrual beauty of wine, the poetic inspirer.
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