Witchcraft 15: Blood Rose
the witchcraft evil yoga saga continues with even more telekinetic murder, clothed sex and batshit continuity. at one point will spanner, after telepathic fusion with a hot yoga witch, remarks: "scanning that girl's brain was like searching through an empty trash can," which is exactly how i feel suffering FIFTEEN installments of this franchise.
Witchcraft 15: Blood Rose
Our story thus far has begged the question of why? Why was the break with "mother earth" and Snake so complete? Why did Eve cast her serpent of female instruction to the ground, changing it from a central metaform back to simply a creature? What became, in the West, of the rich goddess heritage archaeologists have unearthed from our near-past? How is it that some indigenous peoples of the Americas retain a female-centered, snake-revering, blood-based, and earth-protective tradition lost to the Spaniards and other Europeans who overran their continents after 1492? What became of menarchal rites? How did menstruation come to be listed as a biological condition rather than the center of the human mind and spirit? And why is the modern approach to matter and to female origins so different from that of the Kogi, or even the ancient Sumerians, who lined in long processions to bring their [p. 248]
The accumulation of forms and ideas spill out of women's seclusion rites and pass over to the male domain, where they become public, extended completions of the cosmogony of the whole people. This passage happens through several vehicles, among them, parallel menstrual rites that lead to hunting, blood sacrifice, ritual games, and warrior battles. Another example of crossover is shamanism, that special male apprenticeship, often of men who identify with [p. 249]
Motives for a male tradition of thievery are implied in the testimony of Native Australians: "the women have everything, the blood, the baby, everything . . ." [2] Women, through the offices of seclusion and direct blood synchrony, collect essential principles and metaforms, and the men, if they can't get them otherwise, break in to get them. According to some traditions, bold men "opened a hole in the women's weaving house," or overran the women's living complex, or through some other effort, acquired some of the paraphernalia women had developed. That this requires breaking taboos to which the whole society has agreed for [p. 250]
Male traditions of thievery are found among many peoples. In some South American tribes, the men describe suddenly raiding the women's part of a village and stealing "their things," including string and a flattened stick with which the men made a noisy instrument, a bull-roarer, which they then used to frighten the women. A global mythic tradition of men or boys stealing women's clothing, especially the clothing women leave on the river bank while they bathe, has been suggested by folklorist Martha Beckwith as the theft of menstrual garments.[3] Unless the women gave some of theirs, menstrual blood for sorcery, healing, or magic could be acquired only by stealing. In the West, we might see a fragment of this tradition in college dormitory panty raids!
The male theft of fire, and the sun, is another theme common to myths across a variety of cultures. In a northern Asiatic tradition, Old Grandmother's grandson stole fire from her and burned down the world. Prometheus stole fire from the sun in Greece --- from the protomoon, men got the red fire, like blood. In one African myth, the culture hero Mokele "steals" the sun when he goes up a river and discovers the place where the sun lives in a cave.[4] This act of differentiation of the sun surely means he "stole" it from the original protomoon of the female tradition.
The factors leading to this extraordinary crossover from the rich female-centered pantheons that established urban and farm life to the "seminal" and "conceptual" ideology of the male All-god can only be guessed. But it is clear that a shift in blood sacrifice was one such factor. The god of Abraham had replaced human sacrifice with animal sacrifice, and gradually the herdsman's "mentality" --- a [p. 257]
Gradually, from Catholicism and Greek orthodoxy through the Protestant reform movements, Christianity stripped itself of all but the most narrative approach to blood ritual. In the English, German, and Swedish Protestantism of my grandmothers, women not only were kept away from the sacred ritual, they also wore only the slightest cosmetikos. The old cosmetikos of slashing of the skin and tatooing had been forbidden since the writing of the laws of Leviticus, but these women took austerity much further. They held their faces very still, engaged in no public mourning, kept their food as white as possible, never threw plates, did not dance or move their pelvises --- as though they ordered their world through the degree of stillness and paleness they could maintain in the face of any adversity. They expressed themselves instead with small collections of miniature crafts, kept in glass cupboards and carefully displayed and dusted. (One of the signs of possession by "Satan," the Inquisition taught, was expression of enthusiasm.) And no mention of menstruation, no memory of its connection to religion and female origins of culture, no use of the Jewish menstrual bath and celebration of sexuality, no calling in of the Shekinah, no statues showing Christ's blood running down his side, no Madonna standing on her crescent moon and her snake. The Sabbath of sepa- [p. 262]
No secret violent tempers my mother ever exerted on her children can be discussed with her. She acts as though they never happened. If press her with an example, she speaks vaguely of "past mistakes," but never acknowledges details. As a female child under my mother's roof, I could not drink, curse, talk about sex or death, whistle, dance, talk with my hands, yawn without covering my mouth, sleep past 7:00 A.M., or be overly enthusiastic on any subject. I could not discuss blood or any violence. When I was very young, up to about age eight, I had to stand silently for an hour or two in the corner of the living room, facing the wall like a menstruant of old, if I broke a minor rule. (But menstruants had stood facing the wall for weeks, not hours.)
Materialism, as I have imagined, began with crafts and architecture as a means of ordering the menstrual world, manipulating minerals and clay as the earth's blood and flesh. "Goods," processed metaformic objects, were hauled on ships imagined as vulvas of the goddess --- hence the female figures and dragon's heads [p. 263]
Because the female origin stories were suppressed by written narratives of male origin stories, the goddess tradition was lost. Materialism led people to trade crafts with more and more frenzy and without remembering why. By 1492, a Europe terrified by plague and witchcraft sent Columbus and other explorers to gather protective cosmetikos from other peoples --- gold to line the churches, [p. 264]
Perhaps, as the earth itself was treated more and more as a menstrual substance and "taken over by Satan," r'tu lost its power and humankind could no longer protect themselves by their own actions, by adherence to ritual law. Salvation could only come from above --- from light, from grace. In the Christian West, this view was nevertheless sustained by images of the purifying "blood of Christ," which "washes," "redeems," "forgives," and "saves." But the earth was no longer seen as alive or enspirited. In materialist metaformic terms, raw matter was inert and defiling, woman was guilty of evoking its "sins," and man was alone on its broad dangerous surface, looking off the earth, seeking light and eternity.
Among other discoveries of this external light-based science are the idea that nature has laws of its own, independent of human actions, and the germ theory of disease, which mostly has laid to rest witch-hunting doctrines of illness. Even so, many people retain deep shame about certain diseases. That AIDS is related to both sex and blood has made education about its causes very difficult. The shame and silence taboo and the pariah status of HIV positive people, lead to secrecy and greater risk of the disease's spread. Not only AIDS but all genital diseases carry the old menstrual stigma. In my mother's generation, it was also cancer (she cannot speak the word), and in her mother's generation tuberculosis, which displays blood and which killed my mother's father. Recently my mother told me that when she was born in Kansas in 1903, the doctor who delivered her had arrived fresh from a case of smallpox, infecting her. "They didn't know much about what caused such things in those days," she said. "I recovered, but I was always the smallest person in any crowd." She looked sad then, so that I wondered how many years of shame she had lived with, before the germ theory of disease lifted the veil of judgment and fear.
Like menstruants and hunters, warriors abstained from sex, and they endured parallel menstrual disciplines --- keeping silence, altering their diets, removing their hair, covering their heads, painting and slashing their bodies, and wearing animal metaforms of horns, quills, feathers and skins related to the origin stories of their peoples. Sometimes they wore veils. The medieval European king went out on the field with his armies as he had gone hunting, carried in a covered litter. When warriors returned to their village, they underwent purification rites, separation, steaming and bathing, fasting, and other restrictions to remove the menstrual stigma of the "blood on their hands."
War is primarily for the socializing of young men. In urban-based cultures of the past, war was an extension of ritual games in which "the gods like it better if some of us die." [23] That war pits the warrior against his own fear is evident from battles Celtic warriors once fought against the waves of the sea. [24] They waded out, heavy swords in hand, and sliced at waves (Tiamat's great walls of water) until their feet went out from under them and they either drowned or made it back to the beach. They were, perhaps, cutting the dragon in half. Celtic warriors also had many bloody confrontations with each other, keeping blood feuds going among their clans for centuries on end, a practice controlled only by Christian [p.269] 041b061a72