“A most important, novel, well-argued and monumental piece of work.”
J. D. Lewis-Williams, Rock Art Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand

“This book may be the most important ever written on the evolution of human social organization. It brings together observation and theory from social anthropology, primatology, and paleoanthropology in a manner never before equalled. The author, Chris Knight, who teaches social anthropology at the University of East London, is up to date on all these fields and has achieved an extraordinary synthesis. His critiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss on totemism and myth are a sheer tour de force.”
Alex Walter, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University

“Blood Relations is an extraordinary work, in which imaginary creatures and magical events are orchestrated on a global scale, from Australia to Amazonia, into a single vision of how humans created humanity….Though Knight does tend to resemble a shaman with a spread-sheet, he is not concocting some syncretic religious brew of Darwinism and tribal initiation rites. He is every bit as materialist as Dennett or Dawkins – ultra-Darwinian, in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms – but unlike them, he has an intuitive understanding of the sacred. The trick here is to retain one’s sense of magic after one stops believing in it. Blood Relations appreciated the importance of sacred ritual, and of sociobiology, the better for being able to stand outside them. Writing under the influence of Primate Visions, Donna Haraway’s feminist interpretation of primatology, Knight felt able to refer to his own narrative as myth, and free to bring his own props to the sociobiology show. ‘If you could have calculating, maximising capitalists operating in human origins narratives, why could you not also have militant trade unionists?’ he asked. ‘If you could have profits and dividends, why not also industrial action, pay bargaining and strikes?’ Culture, he proposed, was the settlement that followed the world’s first strike.”
Marek Kohn, Science correspondent, Independent on Sunday

“The Most Brilliant Anthropological Study Ever Written. The many words used to describe Chris Knight’s ‘Blood Relations’ include, monumental, encyclopedic, brilliant, original, ingenious, and a tour-de-force. It is all of these and more! This work is simply the most brilliant and imaginative book about human cultural development ever written. Its range is astonishing. Its arguments are cogently made with great detail. Its synthesis of primatology, sociobiology, and anthropology are compelling. Where others have depicted women as the victims of a dominant male hierarchy, Knight reveals how the sex roles and behavior of both men and women developed together in a dialectic relationship. Where others have stressed the loss of oestrus and continuous sexual receptivity in the female, Knight spotlights menstruation and its associated marital and other cultural taboos. Where others stress man the hunter and woman the gatherer, Knight envisions paleo-women as evolving an increasing solidarity to shape the structure of both hunting and gathering. Women are not the passive creatures that are so often depicted by the radical feminists who have an interest in portraying women as the victims of dominant males. Females have been active participants in shaping culture, behavior, and human destiny…Somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago, Knight believes, a massive social, sexual, and cultural explosion occurred and he does an ingenious job of providing us with insight into how this may have happened. A major change in reproductive strategy had to take place before males could take off as hunters and leave their women behind. Women synchronized their ovulatory cycles with one another; the concept of the “sex-strike” is the heart of the book. Blood as a symbol of menstruation provides a key to much of human culture and Knight uses it to explain the inner logic of many of mankind’s myths and taboos. Because the disruptive effects of sex can be enormous, these controls have played an important role in the development of human culture. The riches of this deeply learned book cannot simply be conveyed in a brief review. It is a work to be read over and over and contemplated. The many insights into human culture and the relationships among the sexes will surely provide any open minded person with a new perspective as to why we are the way we are”.
Amazon.com reviewer Dec 25 2000 (Cincinnati, Ohio U.S.A.)

“Chris Knight’s model is one of the rare successful attempts to solve the many apparent contradictions between anthropological universals and what we expect from evolution through natural selection. His great achievement is to put logic in what, otherwise, looks like a vast mess of anecdotal anthropological facts.”
Jean-Louis Dessalles, Télécom ParisTech

“This book was a revelation to me. Having struggled through numerous turgid anthropological works by the likes of Lévi-Strauss, Róheim etc., it was thrilling to read such an ambitious clear-sighted and compelling account of the origins of human culture, together with an excellent critique of much current anthropological thinking. ….a wonderfully stimulating book”.
Mick Hartley, Amazon.com

“A man writing about menstruation as empowering not polluting; a Marxist analysis in which sex solidarity and class analysis assume equal explanatory power; a fully social and revolutionary account of our human cultural origins that privileges women; an explicitly political narrative of science in the first person; an interweaving of anthropology, biology, history of ideas, and philosophy; an attempt not just to interpret the world but to change the world: Blood Relations is all this and more”.
Diane Bell, American Ethnologist

“Ignoring this book is a mistake. It is a very readable, witty, lively treasure-trove of anthropological wisdom and insight….Chris Knight has taken on the task of explicating not only the whys and hows of human cultural evolution, but also vast constellations of cultural behaviour covering Australia, Africa, Europe and all of the Americas.In this endeavour he is extraordinarily cross-disciplinary in his approach, utilizing insights from cultural anthropology, sociology, sociobiology and palaeo- and ethno-archaeology.In short,Knight is a complete anthropologist, one who realizes the value of exploring all corners of his field to synthesize disparate work into a cohesive whole. His deep commitment to such synthesis should give pause to those of us who refuse to look outside our own areas of expertise for support or contradiction of our theories. His Marxist perspective, while of questionable practical value, is metaphorically rich. And his scholarship is impeccable. While many of us rarely bother to read ‘the greats’ of our field any more, Knight delves deep into Durkheim, Frazer and Lévi-Strauss and many others, coming up with long-forgotten insights and providing his readers with an enormously useful review of a century of evolutionary theory and ethnographic data…In fact, as a feminist, I would very much like it if Knight’s story turned out to be true, since it gives so much credit to women’s collective solidarity, strike power and biological and intellectual creativity…. Best of all, it’s a story that’s ‘good to think with’. It made me review in my mind everything I ever learned about evolution and rethink it in a new way.”
R. E. Davis-Floyd, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“Revolutions in science seldom appear ready made…. But I suspect that the basis of a new synthesis between anthropology and biology may well lie within the pages of this book.”
Robin Dunbar, Times Higher Educational Supplement

“Imagine a time when women lived together, worked together, sang and danced together, and our lives, work rhythms, songs and dance rhythms were all governed by the cycles of the moon. Imagine a time when all our skins were dark, Europeans having newly arrived from Africa. Imagine a time when women had the power and solidarity to make men leave their warm hearth-sides, go out into the howling wastes of Ice Age Europe to hunt giant and ferocious mammoths and then transport their kills proudly back to the women’s camp.This is not a feminist matriarchalist dream. This happened somewhere between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, according to the latest scientific account of human cultural origins given by male Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight in Blood Relations. The ‘Human Revolution’, as archaeologists call it, sparked an explosion of symbolic culture that was carried from Africa into Europe, Asia and all the way to Australia 40,000 years ago, and later all over the planet.”
Camilla Power, Everywoman

“No, this is not another Man the Hunter origins myth, with man simultaneously inventing technology, culture and the nuclear family, and teaching it all to his dumb wife sitting at home with baby, waiting for the bacon. On the contrary. First it is not about Man or even Woman: it is about women organising in solidarity with one another. Yes, it is about culture: how women’s solidarity was at the core of it. And yes, it is also about the family: how women’s solidarity exploded the ‘natural family’ of most primate societies, in which the females are the sexual possessions of the male or males. Knight argues that the first human societies were communist. For him, as for Friedrich Engels, this means something historically specific (and nothing whatsoever to do with the monstrosity of Stalinism). Communism meant a society in which women – as never before or since – were free. Women collectively said No to rape, and men obeyed. Responsibility for children belonged to the whole community. Women’s rule – matriarchy – in this sense meant freedom for everyone. Language, co-operation and science replaced physical coercion, animal individualism, and the rule of genes.”
Liz Dalton, Sulfur Magazine

“Read this book and be changed. It is another of the great books of our time whose far-reaching influence in modern culture has not even begun to be felt. BLOOD RELATIONS is beautiful.”
Earl Hazell, Amazon.com

“Chris Knight has produced a book of absorbing interest. The author likens himself to the palaeoanthropological storytellers and it is a fascinating tale that he has to tell. His setting is some 40,000-45,000 years ago…Recommended for health sociologists and students, especially those interested in the gender order of society and in the social significance of biological processes. The book is a narrative, best read through from cover to cover, and this is an agreeable and thought-provoking task.”
Agnes Miles, Sociology of Health and Illness

“One of Knight’s chapters is headed ‘The Revolution’…, but his whole book might well have had this in the title for his thesis has revolutionary implications for modern scholarship as well as hypothesising a revolution in the remote past.”
Emily Lyle, School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh

“A refreshing alternative to the plethora of prosaic and sexist variations on the ‘Man-the-Hunter’ theory of the origins of human culture.”
Cris Shore, Dept. of Social Anthropology,Goldsmiths’ College London

“Blood Relations is magnificent. Comprehensive in design, powerfully informed in execution – this book clarifies not only the problems of the past, but posits the need for a new cultural leap if we are to survive the present.”
M.R.A.Chance, Department of Anthropology, University College London

“Chris Knight in Blood Relations has this ‘extraordinary resolve’. His is an immense work of documentation and close argument. For all its obvious risks, the model offers no hypothesis which is not rigorously testable. Not only this, but it appears to solve most of the outstanding conundrums in contemporary anthropology.”
Peter Redgrove, Times Literary Supplement

“Blood Relations points us all in a refreshingly new direction.”
Clive Gamble, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton

“Encyclopaedic in scope, this is a seminal work that will certainly stand as a classic example of the application of the Marxist anthropological model to an examination of the origin of human culture…”
Choice, American Library Association

“Chris Knight has a political agenda, and he is not going to hide it from us. He is a good Marxist (‘old fashioned’ as some readers are bound to conclude), believing in class struggle, trade-union activism, workers’ solidarity, and most of all in Engels’s version of primitive communism and the early matriarchate….This theory is designed to cock a snook at every premise which sleeps undisturbed in our current assumptions….The result is an exhilaratingly original edifice of astonishing range.”
Caroline Humphrey, London Review of Books

“Blood Relations is an incredible work of scholarship, and in particular of Marxist scholarship – a vindication of scientific socialist theory at a time when Marxism is supposed to be dead. Here we have the actual proof that Marxist theory works. Not by ignoring facts that don’t fit – but by putting the facts first. The facts are sacred. The theory must fit the facts. We’re so used to having paraded before us Marxism and Marxism-Leninism as it was prostituted by the Soviet Union – where if the facts didn’t fit they were ignored – that we’ve forgotten what Marxism really means.Chris’ book is based on the facts. These facts were well-known within a variety of scientific disciplines – sociology, anthropology, archaeology. You look at these facts, and a lot of them seem completely inexplicable. They appear bizarre. Why do women co-ordinate their menstrual cycles? Why do so many religions have taboos onmenstruation? Why do they have taboos on eating bloody meat? And this is not just in one or two societies, but all round the world, in societies which appear to have very little else in common.Now, men were not very interested in these facts. They just seemed to be bizarre things that primitive societies did. Their importance is that they’re the key to understanding how we became human….Chris’ theory may not be 100 per cent correct. But so far, it explains all the known facts. None of the other theories did. And I don’t think it’s too strong to say that in time to come it will be seen as significant perhaps in the way Darwin was seen as significant, in really changing the way we look at what it is to be human.”
Dorothy Macedo, Vice-Chair, Campaign for Labour Party Democracy

“A quite remarkable contribution to our subject.”
Marilyn Strathern, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester

“From the evidence of burials and symbolic objects, rituals and religious beliefs probably go back more than 100,000 years, but could they actually have been central to the origins of modern humans? A British anthropologist, Chris Knight, certainly thinks so, and in a wide-ranging synthesis of data from present-day anthropology, primatology and sociobiology, together with archaeology, he and his collaborators have argued that women collectively produced a social revolution in Africa over 100,000 years ago. The symbolic use of red ochre began as part of a female response to accumulating social and reproductive stresses caused by the increasing demands of pregnancy, infant and child care, and the need for male provisioning. The blood-red pigment was deployed by menstruating and non-menstruating women, speared on their bodies to spread the taboo on menstruation across alliances of female kin. This instituted a “sex-strike”, which could only be broken when the men returned from collaborative hunts with food to share. Female rituals evolved around the sex-strike, male rituals around the hunt (begun under a dark moon, returning at full moon, thus linking menstrual and lunar cyucles and the blood of women and of animals), and tribal rituals of celebration and feasting would follow the return of the successful hunters.”
Chris Stringer, London Natural History Museum

“From apparently modest beginnings, this is the most ambitious project on the origins of culture to have emerged for decades.The effort to establish a collectivist point of departure for the theory of human communication has had to struggle against the individualist assumptions that dominate cognitive science, but this very struggle makes the book original and important”.
Mary Douglas, C.B.E., F.B.A.

“I suspect that it will be a slow burning classic, revived from time to time, but then discarded because it repudiates bourgeois metaphysics.” Keith Hart, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

“As women all over the world fight for control over their own sexuality and fertility, Chris Knight in Blood Relations has performed a service. We can now prove that we’re demanding nothing new. We once had collective control over our own bodies; our fight now is to regain it.”
Leonora Lloyd, Secretary, National Abortion Campaign

“Chris Knight is reconstructing a human revolution that occurred many thousands of years ago. Whether his argument is true or not I am not qualified to judge. But what I want to convey here is the excitement – and the quite extraordinary sense of homecoming and comradeship – which this magnificent book has caused me. But also relief, such relief: as if I am at last in the presence of an understanding which allows something hard and knotted and perverse and intrinsically unshareable, to unfold, stretch, breathe. The release of tension as I read page after page of the detailed, passionate and ironic argument was extraordinary, and something for which I still feel great waves of gratitude.”
David Holt, Lecture to The Guild of Pastoral Psychologists

“This book is a revolutionary textbook for socialists and feminists. It turns upside down the reactionary developments in biology and evolutionary theory that dominated the1980s….Communism – the ideas of revolutionary change, of solidarity, of feminism and of a society organised for the benefit of everyone – is not only still the spectre that haunts Europe, but it is the very thing that created us as human beings…”
Keith Veness, Labour Briefing

“How did human language and culture first emerge? The answer has now been found. It points us back to the very place where we all learned our craft. Human solidarity and culture began on the picket line.”
Jim Perry, Secretary, Cannock Chase & Littleton National Union of Mineworkers

“Blood relations is a bold, panoramic and, in my opinion, easily the most persuasive account of the human revolution. Like any great work there are gaps and unfinished lines of thought – doubtless they will stimulate scholars in the years to come. However, Knight has made the decisive breakthrough which anyone who wants to be taken seriously must develop … or decisively disprove.”
Jack Conrad, Weekly Worker

“What we find most remarkable in Knight’s work is precisely this effort to bring together genetic, archaeological, paleontological and anthropological data in a ‘theory of everything’ for human evolution, analogous to the efforts of the theoretical physicists who have given us super-string or quantum loop gravity theory.”
‘Jens’, International Review

“Knight offers us a model of the birth of culture which, born in practices and needs which are firmly rooted in our biological nature, nevertheless takes form in the real will of our ancestors to impose a collective and liberatory solution to a common problem.”
Timothy Mason, University of Paris

             Full text of this review       

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.”

It is shown that Australian menstrual synchrony is also conceptualized as “like a Mother” and “like a womb.” The chapter culminates in a hypothesis that links the origin of the Rainbow Snake ritual complex with menstrual synchrony. In a coda to the chapter I present some comparative evidence from ancient Greece, the ancient Near East, Western Europe, and East Asia which suggests speculatively a possible parallel to the model of linked menstrual synchrony and snake/dragon symbolism as offered in the chapter.

The discussion in this chapter forms part of a wider argument (see Knight 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986) that menstrual synchrony was once a basic experience of many of the world’s women and a source of female power in society. When for various reasons menstrual synchrony in traditional cultures broke down, its formal structures may have been preserved ritually by men, with secret initiation rites (which included men ritually “menstruating” together) and male-controlled versions of the Rainbow Snake being among the results.

MENSTRUAL SYNCHRONY IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

Direct evidence of menstrual synchrony in Aboriginal Australia is scattered and sparse. We have no report comparable with, for example, Shostak’s (1983:68) note on the !Kung, who “believe … that if a woman sees traces of menstrual blood on another woman’s leg or even is told that another woman has started her period, she will begin menstruating as well.” Nor is there an Australian counterpart to the recent reconstruction of menstrual norms among the California Yurok, among whom it has been hypothesized that in some descent groups “all of a household’s fertile women who were not pregnant menstruated at the same time” (Buckley, this volume; also see Lamp, this volume). The !Kung and Yurok reports, however, are recent; in both cases the ethnographers were aware of the recent medical literature documenting menstrual synchrony among closely associated women (Burley 1979; Graham and McGrew 1980; Kiltie 1982; McClintock 1971; Quadagno et al. 1981; Russell, Switz and Thompson 1980). What indirect evidence we do have for Australian menstrual synchrony, from both early and relatively recent reports (see later discussion), was gathered at a time when menstrual synchrony was not acknowledged as a concept by social anthropologists in the field.

Yet enough exists even in the published record to indicate that Aboriginal culture acknowledged menstrual synchrony long before McClintock (1971) first documented it for Western science. Direct evidence appears in four domains:

1. cat’s cradle string figures and an associated myth of two sisters, called the Wawilak [Wauwalak, Wauwelak, etc.] Sisters;
2. certain other versions of the Wawilak Sisters myth;
3. images of apparently menstruating dancing women from the Pilbara region of Western Australia;
4. mythological images of collective menstruation from the Central Australian Aranda.

Scattered items of additional mythological evidence exist (see, for example, later descriptions in this chapter). Indirect evidence is more abundant but requires the reader’s acceptance of a theoretical interpretation of male ritual and its associated mythology.

[photopress:men_sync_fig_1.jpg,full,centered]

Among the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land (formerly known as the Murngin), menstrual synchrony is an acknowledged, ritually potent possibility. For example, at Yirrkalla, women traditionally made cats’ cradles that were said to represent, among other things, “menstrual blood of three women” (McCarthy 1960:466; see figure 10.1). “The women,” writes McCarthy (1960:424), “make their figures amongst themselves, and not in front of the men, particularly the old men, as a rule. The men walk past and do not look because the game belongs to the women’s sphere of life.” A woman may not make such figures with her husband. “Menstrual blood of three women” is not reported as a subject more frequent than topics such as “three vulvas,” “birth of a baby” and many others (McCarthy 1960:419). However, the theoretically possible male counterparts of these (“three men urinating,” “three penises,” etc.) are not listed as subjects; moreover menstrual synchrony is stressed in the string figure origin myth: “String first made by the two Wawilak sisters at Mudawa, near Buckingham Bay. They saw a lot of honey, about which they made a string loop.” Later the elder sister made a figure of the yams in her sister’s hands: “She then looked inside the latter’s vagina and made another string figure.” Later still, “The sisters sat down, looking at each other, with their feet out and legs apart, and both menstruated. Each one made a loop of the other one’s menstrual blood, after which they put the string loops around their necks.” They were subsequently swallowed by “a Snake” (McCarthy 1960:426).

Some of the remaining direct evidence for Aboriginal menstrual synchrony will now be surveyed. R. Berndt’s (1951:22) version of the Wawilak myth states that ritual dancing was used by two “incestuous” women to synchronize their blood flows. With one sister already shedding quantities of afterbirth blood, the other began to dance: “She moved her body gracefully, shuffling her feet, swaying her body from side to side, and holding in her hands feathered string from which she made cats-cradles as she danced.” This, then, was a cat’s cradle ritual of the “secret” kind noted by McCarthy (1960) among living Yolngu women. It was also a puberty celebration — in the words of the mythical younger sister, “a very happy time, for this is my first menstruation” (R. Berndt 1951:27). The younger sister danced on, “and as she swayed from side to side the intensive activity caused her menstruation to begin” (Berndt 1951:22—23). Blood from both women was now flowing simultaneously, and it was precisely at this moment that “the Snake” also flowed from its own womblike “waterhole” and coiled around the Two Sisters and their child. “There is the suggestion,” comments Berndt (1951:22 n.), “that the snake found the blood attractive.” Certainly it is a noticeable feature of the myth in all its versions that blood must be flowing if “the Snake” is to appear; where there is no blood, there is no Snake.

Rock engravings from the Pilbara region of Australia include images of dancing pairs of women “suggesting the sisters in some Aboriginal mythologies” (B. Wright 1968: figures 99-115). Various of Wright’s (1968) figures may show menstruating women (e.g., figs. 85, 88), two of them dancing together (fig. 112). One drawing (fig. 383) depicts dancers beneath an arc (rainbow?) and beside what may be a snake. Wright’s figure 100 more clearly shows two figures with a snake, and figure 845 is reminiscent of the scene in which the two Wawilak Sisters “sat down… and both menstruated” (McCarthy 1960:426). If the parallel is valid, this image depicts two women conjoined by the same menstrual flow. Figure 105 again seems to show women linked by streams of their own blood, and figure 648 seems to connote cyclicity in the form of a snake. (We regret that the Wright figures were not available for publication in the present volume. — Eds.)

In western Arnhem Land women knew how to bring on their menstrual flows, if late in arriving, by “steaming, massage or violent exercise” (Berndt and Berndt 1951:45). We may speculate that dancing might have been the mythologically sanctioned form of “violent exercise” used to bring on the flow. Although there is little direct evidence for this, other regions of Australia repeat the notion as a mythological theme. Among the Aranda, for example, deposits of red ochre “blood” were formed by the mythical Unthippa women: their sexual organs dropped out from exhaustion, caused by their uninterrupted dancing over the spots where the ochre now lies (Spencer and Gillen 1927, 1:345).

Synchronous feminine bleeding appears in other Aranda myths. At a point along the Finke River is a traditionally used red ochre pit. At this spot two kangaroo women “caused blood to flow from the vulva in large quantities, and so formed the deposit of red ochre.” Traveling away westward, “they did the same thing in other places” (Spencer and Gillen 1899:463-464). In Aboriginal Australia (Flood 1983:46, 238) red ochre was a much-used symbol of ritual power.[1]

In many Aranda myths women who are referred to as alknarintja are recognized by the fact that they are constantly decorating themselves with red ochre, are associated with water, and are “frequently represented as menstruating copiously” (Róheim 1974:150). The alknarintja women of Aranda songs

…cut their breasts.
On their breasts they make scars.
They slap their thighs …
They are menstruating.
Their flanks are wet with blood.
They talk to each other.
They make a bull-roarer…
They are menstruating.
The blood is perpetually flowing. (Róheim 1974:138-139)

Such women possess bull-roarers and other symbols of power, and have solidarity — evoked in one song through the image of a clump of bushes “so thick and so pressed against each other that they cannot move separately” (Róheim 1974:144).

Indirect evidence such as this lends strong support to wide spread menstrual synchrony among Aboriginal women of Australia. In the next section I consider the phenomenon of mythological snake women and rainbow snakes and explore their relationships to menstruous women.

AUSTRALIAN SNAKE WOMEN AND RAINBOW SNAKES

The Alawa Aborigines of western-central Arnhem Land say that certain mythic females, called “Mungamunga girls,” when they go into the water, become merged in the corporate identity of their “mother,” the “Kadjari.” (“Kadjari” and “Kunapipi” are alternative names for this mother figure.) This awe-inspiring woman emerges from the water: she “comes out as one person, but as she stands on the dry land she is manifested as a Kadjari with a group of Mungamunga girls” (R. Berndt 1951:189-190).

The Mungamunga girls, when diving into the water, may be called Kilji:ringkiljiring. When the Wawilak Sisters have been swallowed by a Snake in a waterhole (see earlier) they change their names to Ka’lerika’lering—a name derived from the Ma:ra term (the Ma:ra are neighbors of the Alawa). “This would suggest,” as R. Berndt (1951:173) comments, “that the Mungamunga and Wauwalak are identical.” Ka’lerika’lering means “having been swallowed” (R. Berndt 1951:35). The sisters now “belong to the Kunapipi side — the side of the great ancestral “Mother.” Becoming “at one” with “the Mother” in the water, whose all-swallowing uterus is the “inside” of “the Snake” (R. Berndt 1951:32, 43, 54), and becoming “at one” with “the Snake” in its waterhole therefore appear to be different ways of saying the same thing. This is confirmed by the fact that synchronous menstruation is practiced by the Mungamunga girls, too. In one song from the Ma:ra, a man called Bananggala “comes over and wants to copulate with the Mungamunga, but they are menstruating. They each say to him, ‘I’ve got blood: you wait for a while” (R. Berndt 1951:164). Another song from the same area concerns two men who encounter a group of Mungamunga girls by a lagoon: “No sooner do they seize a Mungamunga and put her on the ground, ready for coitus, than she slides away, jumps up and runs down to the lagoon, and dives into its water; then she emerges and joins the rest” (R. Berndt 1951:174). These women, then, have two ways of avoiding sex with a man: diving into the water, and menstruating. It seems that whether they are menstruating, diving into water, becoming submerged in the identity of a mother figure, or being “swallowed” by a snake, women are repudiating heterosexual intercourse and returning into a symbolic womb instead.

The mythology of western and northern Australia focuses centrally upon “swallowing” episodes of this kind. A Yolngu myth ends by describing how two sisters “decided to go into the waterhole and become a rainbow.” It is explained: “They wanted to be a snake, like the rainbow, when she is standing up in the waterhole and makes lightning” (Groger-Wurm 1973:120). These sisters, then, change their form into that of a rainbow snake, just as the Wawilak Sisters change their names to Having Been Swallowed and the Mungamunga girls submerge their separate identities into the corporate one of “the Mother/Snake.” The positive attitude of the women who “wanted to be a snake” is significant. The women desired to lose their separateness in the formation of a larger whole. There is no evidence to suggest that they would have welcomed the arrival of a monster slayer to “rescue” them from this fate (see the Coda).

Robinson (1966:61-66) provides a dramatic Murinbata story that is worth dwelling on at some length. It is reminiscent of myths from other parts of the world concerning a conflict between a winged snake or “dragon” and a male hero for the hand of a woman — except that the dragon (in the form of the rainbow snake) wins.[2] The rainbow snake Kunmanggur was in the water with a number of water-women or “Murinbungo.” A man called Ngalmin approached and tried to catch one; at first they had been lying along the riverbank in the sunlight, but they saw him coming and “ran and jumped into the water.” Ngalmin went away, disguised himself in mud, approached again and succeeded in seizing a young woman. He went off with her, camping at various places but always carefully avoiding “any big water.” The woman kept asking for water, but Ngalmin insisted on keeping to dry places. Eventually she went off, looking for water on her own, and found a billabong (pool), where she drank:

And when she drank, all the Murinbungo, the water-lubras, rose up out of the billabong. They had long streaming hair and they called out to her: “O, sister, sister, where have you been? We cried for you. Come back to us, sister.” The water lubras reached out their arms to her. They pulled her down to them into the water.

When Ngalmin discovered his loss he cried, cut his head, and lost all interest in life. He returned to the billabong and tried to recover his wife, but she resisted and the rainbow snake frightened him away. Again he attempted life without her but could not stop pining and crying. He returned to the water for a final time, saw his woman lying in the water and cut his head with a stone. He called out to the rainbow snake: “You have to give me your child. I cut myself. You see this blood belonging to me? You have to be sorry for me.” The rainbow snake just lay still, watching Ngalmin; the girl did not move despite the man’s pleas. At last Ngalmin jumped into the water to catch a fleeing woman. Kunmanggur the rainbow snake lashed out from the water, grabbed Ngalmin, crushed and drowned him.

This, then, is a dragon-slaying myth in reverse. The heroine wants to stay with her dragon protector; it is her would-be suitor who is killed. Another myth — from the Kimberleys — makes clear that to try to detach a woman from “the Snake” is to attempt to sever bonds symbolized not only by water but above all by the presence of blood:

A man called Purra was looking for a wife. One day he was crossing a creek when he noticed that its water was red. “Look,” he said, “a girl must be around here. She is at the time of the passing of blood and went into the water. That is why the creek is red.” He followed the water right up to its source. There he found a girl. Her lower half was in the water, but the rest of her was lying on the bank. “She is Tira’s [ rainbow snake’sI daughter,” Purra said to himself. He took the girl, “but he knew that her father, the serpent, would be after him.” He tried to run away but the Serpent followed. Purra kept lighting fires to keep the Serpent away, but one day “the big rain came”; it extinguished Purra’s fire-stick and caused a flood into which Purra’s wife disappeared. (Adapted from Bozic and Marshall 1972:121-123)

This myth eloquently links the notion of being wet or in the rains with a woman’s menstrual state and consequent non-availability as a wife. At the same time, it emphasizes that to be “wet” and menstruating is to be under the guardianship of the serpent.

These are consistent mythological equations and themes. The great snake of the Wawilak myth “swallows” the incestuous sisters as they shed blood into a pool (R. Berndt 1951:23; Warner 1957:254). The Yolngu say that not so long ago a man took his two wives in a canoe for a trip from one island to another. One of them was menstruating. When they had gone for a short time, Yurlunggur the rainbow snake “smelt the unclean odour, came out of the Subterranean depths, and swallowed them all” (Warner 1957:76). In western Anthem Land among the Gunwinggu a menstruating woman should avoid associating with other Women around waterholes or streams; she should stay in seclusion with a fire burning “to keep the Rainbow away” (C. Berndt and R. Berndt 1970:180). In Western Australia the Wagaman snake, Djagwut,

lives in deep springs, rivers and billabongs. His spit is the “secondary” or “high” rainbow. He is the source of spirit-children and the protector of human life. He is especially dangerous to menstruating women, being able to smell them from afar (Stanner 1966:87).

Von Brandenstein (1982:58) suggests that “Muit” and similar names for the rainbow snake in Western and northern parts of the continent derive from a Kariera root meaning “blood & red & multi-coloured & irridescent” When Yolngu neophytes are shown “the Snake” for the first time, it is in the form of two immense white “Muit emblems” consisting of padded poles “with the rock pythons” painted in blood on the white surfaces gleaming in the light of the many fires” (Warner 1957:304). “The Snake,” then, may appear as a line of blood. The Wikmungkan of Cape York confirm this: the snake “is believed to be responsible for women menstruating” (McKnight 1975:95); seeing the red band in a rainbow, people say, “Taipan the-rainbow-snake-has-a-‘sore inside’ i.e. has her menstrual pains” (McConnel 1936, 2:103). The rainbow’s red band, the “snake,” and the menstrual flow are, then, explicitly one and the same.

THE “SNAKE” IN AUSTRALIA

Marshack (1977:286), referring to prehistorians’ difficulties in interpreting Upper Paleolithic “serpentine”/“meander” designs, notes that “what we ‘see’ or recognise conceptually are usually ‘units’ and ‘patterns’ in terms of our culture, units and patterns which are relevant to us in terms of equations derived from our West European training.” It is central to the project of social and symbolic anthropology to escape from ethnocentrism of this kind, yet it is not certain how far we have succeeded.

Radcliffe-Brown (1930:342) argued that the rainbow snake “represents the element of water.” On the basis of native statements that “the Snake” is embodied in seasonal wet/dry alternations, Warner (1957:378) concluded that it is “a weather-symbol.” On the basis of other native statements that “the Snake” is identified with the production of babies, R. Berndt (1951:12-13, 31) argued that it symbolizes “the Penis,” being the counterpart of the “All-Mother,” who symbolizes “the uterus.” For Elkin (1951:9), “no deep analysis is needed to show that the mythical Snake is a sexual symbol.” For Schmidt (1953:909, quoted by Maddock 1978a:2), the creature represents “the male element (membrum virile),” or “the male idea of the penis.” For Triebels (1958:129-130, cited by Maddock 1978a:2), in its snake aspect it symbolizes the spirally formed cosmic power that lay in the world’s virgin waters, while as rainbow it is an emanation of the snake.

Marshack’s (1977:286) note of caution is appropriate here. Snake symbolism in Australia, as elsewhere, is associated with the innermost mysteries of secret rites and cults. Because the “meaning” of the symbols is that given by these religious systems themselves, it is hardly likely to consist of a mental or physical reality — “water,” “weather,” “penis,” or “male idea of penis” — immediately recognizable or familiar to those whose belief system is rooted in the scientific rationalism of Western culture. Maddock (1974:121) suggests “that what is called the Rainbow Serpent is but a visually striking image of force or vitality, a conception that cannot adequately be given figurative expression.” As evidence he cites the Dalabon term bolung, which signifies not only “rainbow,” “snake,” and “the mother of us all” but also “ambiguity in form, creativity, power and time long past” (1974:122-123). The reality in mind “cannot be more than partially and misleadingly conveyed in visual and psychological images like rainbow or snake or mother.” In fact, Maddock concludes, no Western concept or expression can hope to convey the notion of what is meant. The rainbow snake is paradoxical to the core. As Yurlunggur of the Yolngu, he “is both in the heavens. . . and in the subterranean depths” (Warner 1957:386). “He is the highest in the sky and the deepest in the well” (1957:255 n.). Although “he” may be male, he is both “man and woman” (p.383). Likewise the rainbow snake of the Murinbata, Kunmanggur, is bisexual: “Even those who asserted the maleness of Kunmanggur said that he had large breasts, like a woman’s” (Stanner 1966:96). “It is as though paradox and antinomy were the marrow in the story’s bones,” comments Stanner (1966:100) on the basic Kunmanggur myth. Eliade (1973:115) writes that the rainbow snake is able to relate “to women’s mysteries, to sex and blood and after-death existence” because “his structure has permitted the Rainbow Ser pent to unite the opposites.”

What “the Snake” is cannot be simply stated. I propose that an understanding of it may presuppose an understanding of the rhythmic core and structural basis of human culture as such. The meaning of the snake refers us to the logic of Aboriginal Australian culture — and perhaps of all human culture, if we are to trace it to its source; consequently to understand the one may be to fathom the genesis of the other (see Knight 1986). In any event, we need an explanation of the fact that the rainbow serpent “is not confined in Australia to any particular ethnological province, but is very widespread and may very possibly be practically universal,” forming “a characteristic of Australian culture as a whole” (Radcliffe-Brown 1926:24). Indeed, on archaeological grounds, Flood (1983:134) speculates that the snake complex in northern Australia may represent “the longest continuing religious belief documented in the world,” stretching back seven or nine thousand years.

For Maddock (1978a:1), rainbows, snakes, sisters, and related images are “a host of fleeting forms in and through which a fundamental conception of the world is expressed.” As a first approach to an understanding of the Dalabon term for rainbow snake, bolung, he suggests that we should “lay stress on the cyclicity embedded in the concept and. . . draw attention to the role of cyclical thinking in Aboriginal thought generally” (1978b:115). Why should snakes and rainbows be used to conceptualize the force behind the changing of the seasons, the movements of the celestial bodies, the breeding times of animals and plants, and the cycles of life, death, and afterlife? “The curvilinear imagery of snakes and rainbows,” Maddock (1978b:115) answers, “might be considered apt to express the abstract notion of cyclicity.”

In accordance with Marshack’s (1985:141—142) interpretations of serpentine symbolism cross-culturally, let us take it, then, that “the Snake” in one of its aspects connotes cyclical time. It would then be an Australian version of “the serpent of time, of process and continuity, the serpent of self-birth and origins, the serpent of death, birth, and rebirth, the cosmic serpent, the serpent of such processes as water, rain, and lightning, the ouroboros that bites its own tail in perpetuity, the guilloche serpent of endless continuity and turns” (Marshack 1985:142). “The Snake,” like seasonal or any other form of cyclicity, would in this aspect express the logic of alternation, metamorphosis, and change, perpetually incorporating within itself its own opposite: it would be wet season and dry, the highest and the lowest, male and female, and so on.

THE HYPOTHESIS: MENSTRUAL SYNCHRONY AS “SNAKE”

Why were the two Wawilak Sisters “swallowed” by “a Snake”? Were they swallowed by “cyclical time”? I suggest that in a sense they were. It will be remembered that in McCarthy’s (1960:426) version of the Wawilak myth, the sisters sat down face to face “and both menstruated.” They then (a) encircled each other’s necks with “loops” of “menstrual blood” and (b) were swallowed by “a Snake.” Cyclical time seized (“encircled”) the Wawilak Sisters in the form of their own menstrual flows. Being “encircled” by blood and being “swallowed” by a snake were not two separate experiences but are alternative metaphors for expressing the same experience. What, then, is the Snake? On the basis of the evidence so far, the following hypothesis suggests itself.

The Snake is in the first instance a ritual phenomenon. In one of its aspects it is an all-female ritual presence (the opposite aspect is male and is discussed later). As female, I suggest, it is the ritual synchronization of women’s reproductive cycles and menstrual and/or afterbirth flows. It is a way of describing women in such close intimacy that they feel as if they are “one flesh,” “one blood”—or “one Mother.” As the Aranda song put it, they resemble a clump of bushes “so thick and so pressed against each other that they cannot move separately.” With their blood flows conjoining, they form a single flow or stream — its elements as harmoniously conjoined and as inseparable as those of a snake. The Two Sisters who in the myths “turn into a rainbow” or are “swallowed by a Snake” are in reality entering the “wet” phase of the menstrual cycle and becoming engulfed in their own blood-derived unity with each other. Like water-women diving into a river, they are being “swallowed up” in a collective medium that transcends the boundaries of each. Whenever an out-of-phase woman is brought back into synchrony, it is as if her “water-sisters” were claiming her back into their realm (see earlier discussion). These women are indeed “like a snake,” for no creature on earth more closely resembles a river or flow, or can coil itself up into so many repeated cycles. And women are indeed “like a rainbow” — because, given the ubiquity of menstrual seclusion rules in Australia, the blood flow carries them as if from world to world. They move from dryness to wet, and also from marital life to the world of seclusion, just as the rainbow moves cyclically between sunshine and rain, dry season and wet, earth and sky.

TESTING THE HYPOTHESIS

To be of value a hypothesis should make specific predictions and be testable. It should be possible to conceive of types of evidence that, if verified in the ethnographic record, would disprove the hypothesis. The model should also prove fruitful as a research guide, enabling us to seek out evidence that the hypothesis would predict but that had not been “seen” before.

If the hypothesis is correct, we could expect that everything that can be said of menstrual synchrony would be equally true of the (rainbow) snake. We may expect synchronized women to be termed “snake women,” with half of their being in a “wet” phase or element and half in the “dry.” Meanwhile, so-called snakes would turn out to be human mothers. They should menstruate, give birth to human offspring, and copulate with human partners. Assuming that menstrual blood is thought of as “wet” rather than “dry,” menstrual seclusion should be depictable as a snake’s drawing of women into a watery world. In terms of detailed mythological imagery, the “swallowing” episodes would be associated with pools, streams, marshes, rains, storms, wet season, and so on, while the “regurgitations” would be linked with dryness (fire, dry earth, sun, dry season, etc.). A “dry” swallowing and a “wet” regurgitation would disprove the hypothesis. Menstrual seclusion in the real world is a withdrawal from exogamous sex into “one’s own blood,” so no union with a snake should have the characteristics of legitimate exogamous marriage. Snake marriage should be a union of blood with blood — that is, an intimacy comparable with the incestuous relationships of the Wawilak Sisters. A “correct” marriage with a snake would invalidate the hypothesis. Given that menstrual blood is taboo and is also reminiscent of the blood in meat (Warner 1957:278, McKnight 1975:85; compare Knight 1983:41-42), the snake should connote the sanctity of both women and animal flesh during the “raw” or menstrual state.

The exhaustive testing of these aspects of the hypothesis is beyond the scope of the present chapter (for further testing see Knight 1983, 1985). However, other predictions based upon the hypothesis seem already to have been validated in previous sections of this essay. Notably, if our hypothesis is correct, the Snake should be an immense blood-red cyclical phenomenon, analogous to the changing of the seasons, responsible for women’s periodic “death” to marital life, embodying all opposite phases in itself and associated in the first instance with women, pregnancy, fertility, and “wet” things such as rain, storms, floods, and menstrual or other blood. It should prove hostile to marital or exogamous sex, “swallowing” women and their offspring into “incestuous” blood unity whenever and wherever blood was flowing. It should be “sacred,” representing the “tabooed” state of game animals and women alike (compare Knight 1983:41-42). It should be incompatible with fire and cooking (as these destroy visible blood — Knight 1983:41-42; 1986). Although a great deal of this is substantiated by the available myths, there is a further probability not yet raised: the Snake should be a ritual entity beyond the power of men to usurp or control — except in the event that men were able to simulate menstruation and childbirth themselves.

THE SNAKE AS “PENIS” AND MALE POWER

Despite its being a “fantastically painful” operation (Gould 1969:112), subincision is practiced over an immense area of traditional Australia (fig. 10.2). The penis is cut along the underside, the incision reaching to the urethral canal; the organ then opens out wide. During rituals the wound is re opened to produce a flow of blood. The more sacred the ritual (as a general rule), the more bloody — and the more taboo it is to women.

In 1937 Ashley Montagu (1937:320-325) first put forward the theory that “subincision in the male was originally instituted in order to cause the male to resemble the female with respect to the occasional effusion of blood which is naturally characteristic of the female.” He admitted that the idea “must appear fantastic” but provided ample supporting evidence. According to Róheim (1945:171), subincision ritual restrictions look “like a simple inversion of the menstruating taboo, the men saying: ‘We are not allowed to see your bleeding so we shall not allow you to see ours.” The Pitjandjara call the subincision hole a “penis womb” (Róheim 1945:164). Róheim (1945:171) notes further that subincision in general produces [photopress:men_sync_fig_2.jpg,full,centered]
“a penis that is also a vagina,” adding, in agreement with earlier writers, that the bleeding men “are playing the role of menstruating women.” More recently, Berndt and Berndt (1964:145) confirmed Montagu’s original interpretation to this effect.

If the operation is so painful, why do men do it? In keeping with the view of cultural origins that informs this analysis (Knight 1986), I suggest that culture begins with a tendency toward menstrual synchrony; that this determines the symbolic language on the basis of which ritual power is expressed; and that when — in certain regions or at certain epochs — the synchrony breaks down, its formal structures are ritually preserved by men, whose tendencies toward dominance cannot now so effectively be checked. C. Berndt (1965:274) writes of menstruation as “a rite performed more or less automatically by women (although imitated artificially, in various regions, by men).” This chapter has suggested that it is the factor of synchrony that transforms the private experience of menstruation into the collective realm of “rite.” In Aboriginal Australia men’s “menstrual periods” are elaborately synchronized with each other, and there is evidence that the phasing was connected with the periodicity of the moon (Berndt and Berndt 1970:131, 133, 141; Maddock 1974:159; Warner 1957:296; compare Knight 1985, 1986). For example, Berndt and Berndt (1945:309-310) watched a male initiation rite in the Ooldea region of western south Australia, during which ten men simultaneously began puncturing their penis incisures:

The blood was sprinkled on the thighs of the men, either by holding the penis at each side and letting it drip, or by moving so that the bleeding penis flopped from side to side, or upwards and downwards, the blood touching the lower buttocks and loins.

The Berndts (1945:308 n.) note that “the actual initiation was held during the period of the new moon.”

Yolngu men, while not subincising, cut themselves to produce blood. The Wawilak myth tells of how men gained the necessary blood and dancing instructions from the Two Sisters, and this is how Warner (1957:278) presents an interpretation of the blood-letting phase of the corresponding Djungguan reenactment of the myth:

Native interpretation. — The blood that runs from an incision and with which the dancers paint themselves and their emblems is something more than a man’s blood — it is the menses of the old Wawilak women. I was told during a ceremony: “That blood we put all over those men is all the same as the bloodBut really we have been stealing that came from that old woman’s vagina. It isn’t the blood of those men any more because it has been sung over and made strong. The hole in the man’s arm isn’t that hole any more. It is all the same as the vagina of that old woman that had blood coming out of it.”

Rituals of a similar kind are a condition of male ritual potency throughout Aboriginal Australia. To acquire ritual power a youth or man has always to “die” and “be reborn,” and the symbolic language is that of pools and waterholes, wombs, blood, rainbows, and all-swallowing Mothers who are Snakes. Men not only “menstruate”; they are also the agents of their own kind’s “rebirth,” and they “give birth” by taking youths or boys into their collective “womb” — which may be a deep pit — and subsequently expelling (“regurgitating”) them. The original womb is depicted to the uninitiated as having been a monstrous, cannibalistic Mother or Snake, always thirsty for blood. This “bad dragon” — usually associated with the evils of womankind — is said, however, to have been killed and replaced with a more benevolent male-controlled symbolic substitute that does not permanently kill those it “swallows” (Hiatt 1975).

In terms of the model presented in this chapter, it seems clear that the “bad dragon” is the menstrual synchrony and power of women; the “good” one, the male substitute. Male myths justify the usurpation of women’s menstrual power by describing the female version in lurid terms as a cannibalistic monster from which humanity had to be rescued (Hiatt 1975).

Interestingly, however, these male myths are rich with ambivalence and a sense of tragedy at the loss of the original Mother/Snake. The Murinbata snake-woman Mutjingga, for example, had to be killed when she swallowed ten children alive; men cut open her belly and rescued the still-living victims, thus providing the model for contemporary male ritual rebirth (Stanner 1966:40-43). Men regard this tale as “a sorrowful story”; the Old Woman, they say, was once “truly human” and had “primal authority.” With her death a disaster of almost incomprehensible dimensions had occurred. “The loss to man,” say the Murinbata, “was irreparable.” The symbolic substitutes for her are felt to be inadequate. “Because she died,” they say, “men now have only the bull-roarer, which was made in order to take her place… stand for her and … be her emblem, symbol and sign” (Stanner 1966:43, 54, 56). The sound of the bull-roarers — heard across Australia at moments when ancestral blood is flowing — is, among the Ma:ra, explicitly thought to be the sound of the dying ogress’s blood (R. Berndt 1951:150-151).

When Mutjingga swallowed the ten children, she took them down into the waters of a river (Stanner 1966:40-43). When the Wuradjeri medicine man wishes to acquire power from the water-dwelling rainbow snake (called, in this case, Wawi) he has to paint himself in red ochre, follow a rainbow to where it enters a pool, and dive down under the surface (Elkin 1977:87).

Countless other examples could be cited. In this chapter I have suggested that all such processes of immersion in water, all such intimate encounters with a Snake or Rainbow or Mother, are male replications of the female potentiality to conjoin, through menstrual synchrony, in a blood-union transcending the boundaries of the self. The Snake, as Aboriginal paintings from the Oenpelli region of Arnhem Land make clear (fig. 10.3), is a rhythmic line, a flow inseparably associated with the body of womankind. It is a symbol of periodicity — or of “the abstract notion of cyclicity” itself (Maddock 1978b:115). An implication is that the entire structure and language of ritual potency is derived by men from the opposite sex. As Yolngu men say in reenacting the myth of the two Wawilak Sisters,

But really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women), for it is mostly all women’s business; and since it concerns them it belongs to them. Men have nothing to do really, except copulate, it belongs to the women. All that belonging to those Wuwalak, the baby, the blood, the yelling, their dancing, all that concerns the women; but every time we have to trick them. Women can’t see what men are doing, although it really is their own business, but we can see their side. This is because all the Dreaming business came out of women — everything; only men take “picture” for that Julunggul [i.e., men make an artificial reproduction of the Snake]. In the beginning we had nothing, because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women. (R. Berndt 1951:55)

To this Aboriginal analysis I add only that I am not suggesting that universal, or near-universal, patriarchy is caused by men’s menstrual envy, resentment, or desire to appropriate
[photopress:men_sync_fig_3.jpg,full,centered]
women’s menstrual synchrony or its associated power. What I have been trying to show is that the formal structures of men’s rule in the Australian Aboriginal societies considered bear the stamp of feminine menstrual ritual.

CODA: SNAKE MOTHERS AND THE ORIGINS OF RITUAL POWER

“I will put enmity between thee and the woman,” said God to the Serpent (Genesis 3:15), “and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

Blacker (1978:113) has explored “the manner in which, in many parts of the world and particularly in the Far East, this commandment of God has been ignored. We find on the contrary a close and mysterious identification between serpents and women.” Blacker is referring to the snake women of Asian folklore — creatures whose appearance is human until they are spied upon while in seclusion and discovered to be a snake. A Japanese version tells of a woman whose husband spied on her while she was giving birth. Within her parturition hut on the seashore, she had turned into a sea snake or dragon. Angry at having been discovered, she returned to the sea, leaving her baby behind. Her human sister then adopted the boy, married her “son” when he had come of age, and produced from this incestuous union the first imperial ruler of Japan (Daniels 1975:12).

Because structurally similar myths are to be found worldwide, and because they are particularly prominent in Aboriginal Australia, it is worth dwelling on their common features. The myths link (a) women in seclusion with (b) water, (c) incest, (d) snakes, and (e) the origins of ritual power or divine kingship. In Greek mythology Echidna, Delphyne, and Keto “are different names for the same monstrous snake woman or sea monster” (Fontenrose 1959:95-97). Echidna was half young woman, with bright eyes and fair cheeks, “and half snake, dwelling in the depths of the earth, eating raw meat.” She was the “sister-wife” of the monstrous multi colored winged or feathered hundred-headed snake known as Typhon, who still rumbles beneath Mount Etna (Fontenrose 1959:73-74, 95-96). Under another name she was Skylla, a woman from the waist up and a fish from the waist down, described in the Odyssey as living in a cave opposite Etna and seizing and eating sailors as they passed through the straits of Messina (Fontenrose 1959:97). The Sumerian counterpart was the snake woman Tiamat, out of whose defeated body were created earth, sky, and the world we know (Fontenrose 1959:150).

Like the Sumerian Marduk, mythological divine kings and gods the world over are said to have acquired their power through a cosmic battle with the forces of evil or helpless femininity in association with a monstrous snake. The legend of St. George and the Dragon is, of course, a variation on the theme. Womankind, according to patriarchal ideology, stands in dire need of rescue from her original connection with sin in dragonlike or snakelike form (Frazer 1911, 2:155; Fontenrose 1959:469; Ingersoll 1928:194-195). Only once the evil has been slain is the world made safe for marriage as a sacred bond. Only then is the stable world order known today secured (compare Knight 1983).

A recurrent theme, however, is that the male hero, having slain the Dragon, usurps its extraordinary potencies for himself. A Japanese version illustrates this clearly:

A man came to a house where all were weeping, to learn that the last of seven daughters was to be given to a seven-headed dragon, which yearly came to the seashore to claim a victim. The man assumed the girl’s form, and induced the dragon to drink sake from seven pots. He then slew the drunken monster. From the end of its tail he took out a sword which is today the Mikado’s state sword, and married the maiden himself. (Adapted from Ingersoll 1928:105)

Ingersoll (1928:148, 149) notes the dragon reputedly worn on the crest of King Arthur’s helmet, and the dragons used as ensigns by Roman soldiers in their wars with the Britons; he also notes the red dragon as the current emblem of the Prince of Wales. The gold mask of Tutankhamen features a snake with two heads — one birdlike, the other that of a cobra — on the ruler’s forehead (Daniel 1981: facing page 13).

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to detail the world’s royal lineages whose power is symbolized by winged snakes or “dragons.” It is worth noting, however, that the early emperors of China were born from a human woman’s copulation with a dragon. “Such a stupendous affair,” writes Schafer (1973:23), “occurred in the dawn of time when Shun’s mother conceived after a visitation by a rainbow dragon.” In China and Japan the emperor was termed “dragon-faced”; in view of the fatal consequences of seeing such a face, visitors granted an audience were suitably protected, hearing only a voice emanating from behind a bamboo screen (Ingersoll 1928:100).

“In China,” writes Schafer (1973:28), “dragon essence is woman essence.” But it should be appreciated that “the dragon” was not safe, sexually available femininity, but womankind in her ritually potent “wet” and “dangerous” phase when she was anything but “feminine.” The dragon is always ferocious and therefore in a certain sense “male.” “Masculine femininity” and “feminine masculinity” express the core of this creature’s being. It was Frazer (1900, 3:204), following hints from Durkheim (1897), who first drew attention to a seemingly incongruous parallel that illustrates this point and with which this discussion may conclude. The divine kings of much of the ancient world were subjected to taboos that included two in particular: they were not to see the sun and not to touch the ground. “Now it is remarkable,” writes Frazer (1900, 3:204), “that these two rules — not to touch the ground and not to see the sun — are observed either separately or conjointly by girls at puberty in many parts of the world.” The dragon-empowered kings were treated as if they were “menstruating men” (compare Hogbin 1970), being subjected to seclusion rules uncannily like those imposed upon menstruating women throughout most of the traditional world.

10. MENSTRUAL SYNCHRONY AND THE AUSTRALIAN RAINBOW SNAKE

Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the World Archaeological Congress in September 1986 (Southampton, England).

Note. Readers should be aware that much of the previously published material cited by Knight in this chapter is deemed both sacred and secret by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. We republish these readily available ethnographic materials respectfully, for scholarly purposes only, and in hopes that our doing so may ultimately serve the interests of the native peoples of Australia. —Eds.

[1] This was also the case in Upper Paleolithic Europe (Leroi Gourhan 1968:40, Shimkin 1978:271; Klein 1969:226).

[2] I deal with non-Australian “dragon,” “snake,” and other serpent myths in the Coda. It seems clear that use of the term “snake” in reference to the Australian rainbow serpent is a matter of cultural conditioning (and perhaps bias). The mythological creature is a flying serpent — as easily called a “dragon,” in English, as a “snake.” For this reason I use the English “snake” and “dragon” interchangeably in the following discussion.

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FF Network No. 15
(April 1998): 19-21

The gendered interpretation of blood

Isabel Cardigos, In and Out of Enchantment: Blood Symbolism and Gender in Portuguese Fairytales. Folklore Fellows’ Communications No. 260. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Academia Scientiarum Fennica), 1996. 273 pp.
Hard (ISBN 951-41-0784-5), FIM 155,-, Soft (ISBN 951-41-0783-7), FIM 130,-

Available at the Tiedekirja bookstore
Kirkkokatu 14, FIN-00170 Helsinki, Finland
fax: +358 9 635017; e-mail: http://www.folklorefellows.fi/comm/tilaus-fax.html

In and Out of Enchantment by Isabel Cardigos is, as its subtitle indicates, a study of fairytales where the starting point for the analysis lies in Portuguese tale variants. The study interprets two masculine and two feminine fairytale types. The theoretical frame of reference is both traditional and highly innovative. The traditional side of the study is the use of psychoanalytic theories, both Freudian and Jungian, and structuralist models as tools of interpretation. The innovative aspects stem from the feminist approach which in this case means problematising some of the traditionally male-biased psychoanalytic views and making them work in a female-focused and female-oriented way.

The tale types analysed are The Twins or Blood Brothers (AT303), Faithful John (AT 516), The Snake Helper (AT533*) and The Girl as Helper in the Hero’s Flight (AT 313), the first and second of which are clearly masculine plots and the other two feminine. Cardigos explains her aims at the beginning of the book as follows: “The intention of the analysis is to differentiate the masculine and feminine voices that have generated the structure and symbolism of fairytales. In particular there is a focus on the symbolism of bloodshed as it occurs in hero and heroine tales.” The symbolism of bloodshed, argues Cardigos, is important because it “is central to a syntax of enchantment and disenchantment that is common to all the tales.” (p. 13). In the analysis this syntax is interpreted in terms of the disconjunction and conjunction of man and woman – or the heterosexual union or lack of it which turns out to be very much at the core of all these tales.

One of the sources of inspiration for this argumentation has been the theory of the anthropologist Chris Knight on the origins of culture. Knight’s theory is based on the idea of the ancient symbolic correspondence between the phases of the lunar month and women’s menstrual cycle. Women’s bleeding and their inaccessibility to men during that period were synchronised symbolically with the moon’s darkness; this was the time of disjunction of the male (who went hunting during that period) and the female side of society; the lifting of the sexual taboo (by purifying rituals) during the lighter phase of the lunar month ended up with the conjunction of males and females and sexual relations. Cardigos sees here an analogy to the “in and out of enchantment” cycle so typical of fairytales.

In Knight’s theory, the binary systems (and thinking) founded on gender difference, which have been among the most discussed themes in feminist studies, are thought to be originally based on the difference between this conjunction and disjunction, coupling and uncoupling, or as Cardigos says: “The divisions cease to be between man and woman, but between togetherness and separateness. The outcome of this shift in primal logical pairs has the advantage of positing a conceptual world free from the marginalization of woman.” (40) Free, because the pairs of opposites posited by Knight (Dark Moon – Full Moon, Blood – Semen, Raw – Cooked, Wet – Dry, Water – Fire, Blood-Kinship – Exogamous Groups, Abstinence – Feasting, Ritual – Celebration, Menstruation – Ovulation) include both women and men, only in different relational situations. According to this theory, then, woman only became branded with the negative pole of the binary opposition later on, when there was a shift from the prehistoric (more equal) “cultural structures of continual alternation between sexual modes into a focus on one mode alone, that of the exogamous couple in which it was the male who was empowered. This would explain the symbolic dominance of one sphere of thought over the other. Fairytales show this shift in symbolic power as they consistently end with a happily married couple”, writes Cardigos and continues: “This can certainly be seen as a ‘male’ view, insofar as it only values one side of the female cycle alone – the ‘ovular’, fertile, and male-responsive aspect of woman.” (41)

The valuation of only one side of the female cycle has, as Cardigos argues in her analysis of the fairytales, introduced the abjection and fear that men feel for the other, menstrual or virginal side of the female cycle or the bleeding in childbirth. The snakes, monsters and dragons that the heroes of the fairytales must fight and overcome before they can unite with their brides on the wedding night represent this fear symbolically, says Cardigos. This interpretation does not, she also says, necessarily contradict the other meanings given to these symbols (as for instance, by Bengt Holbek, for whom the dragon that lives on women’s blood is an affective impression of the kinship bond with the father). Cardigos refers in connection with her interpretation to information existing in ethnographic descriptions around the world about customs of defloration of the bride by older, more powerful or experienced men, or by older women, who may use different sorts of instruments to break the hymen in order to safeguard the young bridegroom against the evils of the virginal blood, and also to taboos connected to menstruation and childbirth in different cultures. For Cardigos, the monsters of the fairytales could be symbolic remnants of these customs.

Cardigos’ analysis does also speak of the fairytales in other, but connected terms: the enchanted, “bad” space for the hero and its opposite, the disenchanted, “good” space. But the space that displays to a hero itself as bad or enchanted may for the heroine represent the time of the other side of her cycle of bodily or social life, the precondition of the “good” as interpreted from the male point of view, the conjunction in marriage. The fairytales are thus about solving the problems arising in the shift in status from unmarried to married, described as a journey or adventure for the hero and speaking symbolically in terms of the fear of the “other”, the feminine “unknown”, not-yet-experienced which concentrates, according to Cardigos, on the blood symbolism.

As Cardigos says, the discourse in most of the fairytales is masculine; women are most often silent objects of dispute or mediation in male adventures, but even then it is possible to discern them as “muffled organizers”, “the presence that determined the path of the male adventure” (209). In the feminine tales like “The Little Snake” this syntax is given conscious wording: “These tales brought forth the female perception of the necessity to be governed by a skin-shedding friend in order to emerge in full womanhood. This friend can appear as a rival or mortal enemy, a ‘black bride’ – until the heroine is ready to appear as the ‘white bride’. ‘The Little Snake’ demonstrated that the ugliness of the ‘black bride’ is a male perception of the ‘wrong’ times of woman: in the story the snake is golden and beautiful except for those times when the heroine can be decoded as shedding blood, at those times the snake turns into a horrible serpent. If kept a secret – out of man’s sight – this never happens.” (ibid.)

Cardigos refers somewhere in her discussion to the double (standard) meaning of the bloodshed: woman’s blood shed in menstruation, defloration or childbirth is mostly regarded as defiling, pollutive, dangerous, but men’s blood shed in battle is considered sacred, purifying. And blood sacrifice has been and is the most powerful means of affirming male genealogy and solidarity. How come the blood shed at birth is pollutive, but that shed in killing is purifying? Isabel Cardigos gives us one answer in her fairytale interpretation: if we invert the discourse and listen to the feminine voice, it is easy to see that the quality of the blood depends on the frame of the gendered interpretation which has for so long been masculine.

“In and Out of Enchantment” is a richer analysis of fairytales than I have been able to describe here, and I have mostly paid attention to the analysis of the blood symbolism. The book also includes an admirably condensed and clear introduction to the basic knowledge on fairytales and their study and can be recommended to any beginning folklore student. For those of us who have never read any Portuguese fairytales it does, of course, offer an expert introduction to that tradition. And the book is really exciting to read in all its details without killing the enchantment which the fairytales themselves spark off in the mind: “There was once a king who was very unhappy at not having a son or a daughter. At a certain time the queen gave birth to a child of the feminine sex, a child whom a very evil fairy enchanted as a little snake, a spell which would last until the snake was soaked in the waters from a child-birth.” And what happened then?

Aili Nenola
University of Helsinki

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.
Download The Wives of the Sun and Moon [PDF 412KB]

A review of Chris Knight, 1991. Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Women initiated culture. It was they who opened the door to human history. They did so through a sex strike whose banner was the blood of menstruation.

This is Chris Knight’s claim in ‘Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture’ (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). It is the story of a revolution which worked. It is a book which will provoke some to fury, others to delight. It is based on 25 years of research and debate, and a wealth of evidence from the new biology, primatology, archaeology, palaeontology, social anthropology and the structural analysis of mythology. The author, a Marxist, an anthropologist and a man, makes no apology for any of this, but does acknowledge his debts to the women thinkers and activists — from scientists of almost every discipline to poets, witches and Greenham women — who have been and still are researching the same issues.

Friedrich Engels wrote over a hundred years ago that in order to become culturally human, our animal ancestors had to overcome male sexual jealousy, which lay at the heart of all hierarchy, competition and conflict over sex and food in the animal world (Engels, F. 1884. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State). Sex organised pre-human society. Chris Knight argues that ‘with the establishment of earliest culture, society at last succeeded in organising sex’.

When did this happen? Central to Knight’s book is the exciting debate now opening up on the dating of the birth of anatomically modern humanity. Becoming culturally human was bound up with our evolutionary achievement of anatomical modernity – the one was contingent on the other. All the evidence of the new palaeontology, archaeology and molecular biology points to the same extraordinary conclusion: humanity in evolutionary terms is a tiny newborn baby.

Around 200,000 years ago the ‘African Eve’ who mothered all of us (according to the newest genetic studies) appeared in sub-Saharan Africa. Neanderthals were still roaming in Northern Europe when we started moving into other continents, to leave our fossilised bones 100,000 years later — and have them unearthed 100,000 years later still – in Israel at Qafzeh, and in South Africa at Blombos Cave and Klasies River Mouth. We ‘daughters of Eve’ were deliberately mining red ochre for use in body-painting and ritual — the collective symbolic action which Knight sees as the basis of all human language, kinship and culture. Already 100,000 years ago, the ‘symbolic explosion’ was beginning to get under way. In Europe, the outcome is known as ‘the Upper Palaeolithic revolution’, which took off soon after the beginning of the last great Ice Age. Modern humans (the Cro-Magnons) were suddenly spreading across the world, in the space of a few thousand years moving from Africa to Asia and Australia to eastern and western Europe and finally to the Americas. They had home bases, domestic fires, sophisticated and developing tool kits, and an organised sexual division of labour. They not only talked; they also spoke poetry, played musical instruments, sang and danced, and decorated themselves with body-paint. Ritual, as ‘the collective dimension of intimate, emotionally significant life’ (Knight) gave us our meaning. It defined us as human. We knew then how to rejoice in the achievement.

How did it happen? Scientists from every relevant discipline are at present puzzling over it. Knight sees it as a revolution: the successful outcome of a long struggle against our previous ‘animal’ social organisation.

As riverine and shoreline gatherers, scavengers and small game hunters, our still earlier ancestors — living over 200,000 years ago — had been able to survive happily as long as the mild climate of the interglacial years provided us with food in abundance. Males, females, and even infants could almost equally well gather what grew, lay or crawled around them. The failure of males to provision their sex-partners or offspring, in such a context, hardly mattered and could be tolerated. It was, after all, part of the natural order of things — for primates.

We were designed for paradise. In the tropics and sub-tropics, African Eve’s children, naked and warm, played, swam, and picnicked on the beach. Knight supports Elaine Morgan’s hypothesis that we adapted to wading and swimming as we evolved along the lakeshores of East Africa and the coasts of the Afar Gulf. Significantly for his theory, he believes that our ancient association with rivers and the sea conditioned our own biological rhythms. Prior to the revolution which made us culturally human, Knight believes that females already had the biological capacity to synchronise their ovulatory and menstrual cycles with one another and with the tides. The tides, as everyone knows, are governed by the moon. So — there we gambolled, well-fed, sunburned and moonstruck.

But then, as eventually it always must, something else happened. The global climate began to change. First at one place, then at another, our anatomically modern ancestors were forced by rapidly changing environmental conditions to seek increasingly scarce food far from the shores. The natural order no longer worked — at least, not for the mothers and their infants. With their ultra-dependent offspring so much longer and heavier a burden than were the offspring of any other primates, the mothers started noticing bitterly with what ease the unfettered males travelled and could feed themselves. For there was plenty of food to eat. But it was no longer growing, lying or crawling. It was walking or running away. It was the era of big game, the golden age for the giant mammals roaming the plains, surviving all weathers as long as the grass did. And the males of our species were going hunting.

No, this is not another Man the Hunter origins myth, with man simultaneously inventing technology, culture and the nuclear family, and teaching it all to his dumb wife sitting at home with baby, waiting for the bacon. On the contrary. First it is not about Man or even Woman: it is about women organising in solidarity with one another. Yes, it is about culture: how women’s solidarity was at the core of it. And yes, it is also about the family: how women’s solidarity exploded the ‘natural family’ of most primate societies, in which the females are the sexual possessions of the male or males. Knight argues that the first human societies were communist. For him, as for Friedrich Engels, this means something historically specific (and nothing whatsoever to do with the monstrosity of Stalinism). Communism meant a society in which women — as never before or since — were free. Women collectively said No to rape, and men obeyed. Responsibility for children belonged to the whole community. Women’s rule — matriarchy — in this sense meant freedom for everyone. Language, co-operation and science replaced physical coercion, animal individualism, and the rule of genes.

How was this revolution achieved? Like all revolutions, Chris Knight argues: by going on strike. It was women who desperately needed change. They went on sex strike. ‘They collectively refused sex whenever meat supplies were exhausted or men attempted to approach without meat’ (Knight). They signalled No with the blood of menstruation; and the equation ‘Blood = No’ simultaneously extended the taboo to the blood of game animals. Hunters must not eat their own kill. It must be returned to camp, handed to the collectivity of women, and cooked to remove all blood before being communally eaten. At one blow the women’s strike action prompted the collective organisation of men for the benefit of all; outlawed generalised or individual male dominance; and, in seeming paradox, separated sex from foodgetting. Individual sex-for-food bargaining was banned. Women’s bodies were sacred — to themselves and others. The food given by men to their sexual partners was then shared among the women’s blood kin. A hunter had rights not in his own kill, but in the meat given to him by his sisters, which they in turn had received from their partners. Heterosexual relations were enjoyed only in conditions free of need, when everyone had been fed.

The model explains at a single stroke menstrual and incest taboos and the origins of human kinship systems. Culture — collectively agreed rules and rituals governing society, something unknown in the animal world, and a unique breakthrough in evolution — was born. Sex was subordinated to economics. As Chris Knight argues, this was necessarily women’s initiative not because they enjoyed sex any less than men, but because, as every mother knows, when it comes to the crunch, the baby and its survival has to come first.

With this book the whole apparently mighty edifice of patriarchy is challenged at its roots. It can be seen as nothing more than a gigantic bluff (backed up of course by force) perpetrated on women since the end of early communism from around 10,000 years ago. Woman as the Other, as Nature, as outside or antithetical to culture, and ultimately, for the extremes or religion or fascism, as outside humanity — it is all a projection by a society which since the onset of male and class rule has been profoundly anti-woman, profoundly fearful of women’s solidarity, and the socially transforming power which it engenders.

‘Blood Relations’ implicitly challenges the fear of femaleness which western feminism itself has not yet overcome. Can we ever be biologically whole, culturally human, and free to make whichever sexual choices we wish? The bland designer feminism which is dominant today provides only a grotesque pseudo-answer: the individual woman as super-commodity, in intense competition with every other woman, selling herself body and soul once more — but this time only to the highest bidders.

We can be whole and free. Because originally, we were. We went on strike, not once, but every month. Our clock was the moon. The rhythm of our blood flow sent the men to hunt and us to our inner world where we could centre ourselves and be close, both sexually and spiritually. The men’s rhythm, and their intragender closeness, mirrored ours. When the hunt was over, heterosexual relationships could be resumed. There was a time for every season.

The mechanical rhythms of capitalism are making us ill. That the present world is dying has become a cliché. While the rich stuff themselves or starve themselves, the poor just starve. War, pollution, disease, disaster, violence, rape, personal loneliness and misery stalk all our lives. Children expect the end of the world. Many are already suffering it. Our so-called ‘natural order’ no longer works — at least, not for the vast majority of us. Cold, hungry, facing their children’s questioning eyes, the poor of the world notice bitterly with what ease the super-rich travel and feed themselves. For there is plenty of food to eat. And the power of new technology is almost limitless. But it is all controlled and possessed by a tiny minority. It is the era of plenty, of superabundance….

The ferment of new understandings about our beginnings of which this important book is a part could help us find our way — back to the future.

Liz Dalton (adapted from the original version published in SULFUR magazine, Michigan USA; October 1992).

Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture by Chris Knight.
Yale, 581 pp., £40, 31 October 1991,0 300 04911 0

Most people, including most social anthropologists, have only a hazy idea about the origins of human culture. For decades the whole treacherous territory has been avoided, and anthropology has come to construct itself in such a way that the subject is indeed unknowable. But here is a book which calls discretion’s bluff. Chris Knight has come up with a new and startling theory: human culture originated with a sex strike by female primates, a revolutionary act of collective solidarity which transformed ‘females’ into women. Culture came into being, Knight says, when evolving human females decided to control their own sexuality, allowing access only to males who provided them and their offspring with meat from the hunt. The ban on sex coincided with menstruation, women’s infertile period, which they now all synchronised with one another. Culture was, in effect, the social ritualisation of the rules consequent on the sex strike. Males had to forego the consumption of their own kills and feed them to their sexual partners. Females had to prevent the advances of non-hunter males, including their own adolescent sons. Thus appeared the first taboo, against eating meat killed by oneself, and the first human social group, the matrilineal coalition or clan.

Weird, you may well think. However, do not dismiss these ideas before you hear a bit more. This theory is designed to cock a snook at every premise which sleeps undisturbed in our current assumptions, and we should at least start to wonder why we find it so strange. For a start, it has always been presumed that culture was invented by males. The last great anthropological theory on the subject, that of Lévi-Strauss, definitely took this line. In the pre-cultural state, males took sexual partners anywhere, especially in their own group, so that boundaries between categories such as ‘wife’, ‘sister’ or ‘daughter’ were unmarked. The advent of culture occurred when men rejected this sexual free-for-all. One group of males gave its females to a second, trusting in reciprocity, and it was in this discovery of generosity — for a woman was the most precious of all gifts — that culture was born. Human culture was thus a matter of creating social relationships between groups of men. Unlike almost all anthropologists of his generation, Lévi-Strauss rejected the idea that the basic unit of human society was the nuclear family consisting of husband, wife and children. For him, the ‘atom of kinship’ had to include the wife’s brother, who had given her away. It was the incest taboo which marked this act of generosity, ensuring that group after group of males would seek partners outside its own bounds, forming extended chains of social relationships.

While this theory remains respectably gathering a film of dust, neglected perhaps because of the unfashionableness of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism in general, a different type of theory has gained a far more potent influence on the public imagination. This is sociobiology, with its stark doctrines of genetic advantage. The name of the game is to have one’s genes survive through the generations. The activity of Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ does not stop with nature, but stalks boldly into culture, with differing results for men and women. In earlier days, we had all been happy to leave genetics to ‘nature’, following the train of thought exemplified by Kroeber’s famous case of ants versus children. If you take two ant eggs and raise them in complete isolation they will nonetheless recreate of their own accord an entire ant social system. However, if you take two human babies and bring them up without any learning from other humans they will produce ‘only a troop of mutes, without arts, knowledge, fire, without order or religion’. Heredity, Kroeber concluded, preserves all the ant ever had from generation to generation, but it does not and cannot maintain civilisation, which is the one specifically human thing. Culture is not only not reducible to biology, but, as anthropology was only too happy to conclude, free of it. But sociobiology has sliced through this complacency. Now the public receives a more alarming set of assumptions from a series of bestsellers: male competitiveness and ruthlessness in society is natural, rooted in the genetic strategy of inseminating as many females as possible, while a female’s genetic fitness is far more passive, concerned with such things as food and shelter for existing offspring. As Knight and before him Haraway have observed, many feminist challenges to this picture have been somehow in the same mould. Concerned to argue that the female primate is not simply quietly nurturant, they picture her as like the male, another autonomous active plotter of her own aggressive strategies. Knight accuses social anthropology of allowing this ‘dire situation’ to come about. By turning its back on evolutionary debate, engaging in a self-absorbed analysis of ‘cultures’ which hovers pleasantly above the gene-bound battlefield, anthropology has allowed sociobiology to triumph. ‘The wider public has turned, for lack of an alternative, to people who (to exaggerate only slightly) know nothing about culture at all.’

Chris Knight has a political agenda, and he is not going to hide it from us. He is a good Marxist (‘old-fashioned’ as some readers are bound to conclude), believing in class struggle, trade-union activism, workers’ solidarity, and most of all in Engels’s version of primitive communism and the early matriarchate. Sociobiology, he says briskly, ‘is very right-wing, but good for us’. He reminds us that the heyday of sociobiology in the 1980s coincided with the rise of the New Right, and that its language resorts to economic and military metaphors: genetic ‘arms races’, ‘cost-benefit calculations’, ‘payoffs’ and so on. Nevertheless, sociobiology is liberating because it is like a corrosive acid which eats away at our illusions, at all unexamined premises lingering from a previous age, about ‘hordes’, ‘communities’ or ‘mother-child dyads’. In other words, it questions how natural it is for humans to co-operate with one another at all. Sociobiology does not deny altruism in nature, but it insists that it is a challenge to our understanding; it requires explaining.

Blood Relations is a radically alternative view on this very point: the crucial initial co-operation of our species was that of females, who indeed were ‘active’, as the feminist sociobiologists had pointed out, but not in a male kind of way. Instead, women took charge of the feminine in themselves and forced men to conform to its rhythms. Knight describes almost mystically how he conceived his theory as a graduate student, gradually absorbing or rejecting other people’s ideas through years of reading. The result is an exhilaratingly original edifice of astonishing range. One early influence was Dawkins’s notion of a novel form of evolution proper to humans. This was based on the immortality, not of genes, but of culture-constituting instructions, ‘memes’. Surviving over generations and rapidly evolving, memes exist over and above the genetic links of the people who transmit them. Myth and ritual are examples of this. It is in these forms that Knight discovers links between lunar periodicity, menstruation, blood, cooking, the image of the snake and the regulation of sound, which persist despite the later imposition of patriarchal marriage and masculinist ritual.

What is the scientific basis for Knight’s theory? Most pertinent was his discovery of Turke’s research on the evolution of human female reproductivity. Even Knight says that his own intuition came first: ‘I had long felt that there was something explicitly competitive about the manner in which female chimpanzees and many other primates display their brightly coloured, swollen genitals at or around the time of ovulation. By the same token, my guess had been that the human condition of ovulation concealment and absence of sexual swellings had evolved in the context of a less behaviourally competitive sexual-political dynamic. To be more precise: I had long felt that inter-female gender-solidarity had had something to do with the unusual and characteristic features which the human female showed.’

Turke reasoned as follows: in the ‘one dominant male with a harem of females’ scenario it was obvious that the females’ ovulation would have to be out of cycle in order for them to be impregnated in turn. But if the females rejected the ‘alpha male’ system so they could each have their own male (even if this was just one of the weedier, undominant males who previously would have remained unmated), it would then be logical for them all to synchronise their ovulatory cycles. This would at the same time strike a blow at the dominant male system and lessen direct sexual competition among themselves. Selection pressures would act to favour the females who resisted pressures to separate them from potentially useful males, even if these males were not inclined towards fighting and dominance. In these circumstances it would be in the females’ interest to conceal ovulation and to extend their sexual receptivity throughout the cycle — which is what human females do.

Knight makes no bones about the fact that he wanted his theory to vindicate Engels’s vision of primitive communism and the early matriarchate. Now this is a somewhat dicey proposition. Anthropologists have found little evidence that existing matrilineal societies conform to the matriarchate. Although descent is reckoned through women, females are certainly not the dominant decision-makers in these societies. Nor is it widely accepted that existing patrilineal societies hide earlier matrilineal ones in their past. However, no one actually knows for sure what the earliest human societies were like, and Knight may be right that if mid-20th-century anthropology had not been so anti-evolutionary it might have been less dismissive of the idea of the early matriarchate. But right at the beginning of his book he takes a self-protective (and fashionable) sidestep, by saying that his theory is his myth, just as Engels’s theory was his myth. We may well wonder, why use the word ‘myth’ if not to imply: ‘Do not expect all this to be true’? However, this is not quite the line Knight takes. He argues that the test of a good myth is for it to be widely and enduringly believed, and for this to happen it must be part of a common discourse.

In the game of scientific discourse, despite all the contestants’ many disagreements and conflicts, the players have no choice but to adhere, for the duration of particular debates and contests, to at least some agreed ground rules. The rules that matter are those for disputing what kinds of observation are to count as data. ‘The facts’ themselves will never be stably agreed upon or there would be no game. But the procedures for constructing and verifying them must be shared as common currency at least up to a point … I write under such constraints. I fully expect my narrative to be vigorously contested.

So Knight sort of steps back into the critical arena. His book alternates the ‘this is a politically-inspired myth’ idea with chapters devoted to evidence and proof. The former wins out at the end though, with some passages so buoyant that one feels the guy-ropes are only just tying them down.

I would like to acknowledge the bold imagination and range shown in this book. Few reviewers, and certainly not this one, would be capable of judging all the arguments and facts from many disciplines which are assembled as evidence. But there are some parts of the theory which seem worrying on purely logical grounds. Why, for example, should it not be in the female’s interest to strike-break — to keep a weedy husband by her side but secretly mate with the powerful ‘alpha male’, all the time concealing the true fatherhood of her offspring? Life suggests another unfortunate possibility. Would a female sex-strike actually overturn the dominance of the lord of the harem? It is not inconceivable that some fertile brute would cope perfectly well with quite a large number of females, even if they did synchronise their menstrual cycles. Though distant from humans, there is the example of lions. In a pride of lions the females all come into oestrus together. This happens, among other occasions, when one dominant male has taken over the pride, driving off his rival. He then inseminates all the females in one short period. Ethologists have suggested that this pattern is to the females’ advantage: their offspring are given a better chance of survival when they venture into the wild by the fact that they are a cohort (of half-siblings). Even if, as Knight argues, there are many primate cases in which the single male is unable to prevent other males from entering the group if females come into cycle together, the argument is not watertight as regards early humans. Since women in general do not have synchronised menstrual cycles, and hunters in fact often eat game killed by themselves, a large part of the book is taken up with broken taboos, rules which are not observed, hidden mythic meanings and suppressed harmonies. All this indirectness means that Knight’s evidence is often susceptible to quite different interpretations.

But I find this book stimulating, positive and brave. True, the particular version of feminism assumed here is unsubtle, and the ‘class struggle’ rhetoric seems as arrogant as the masculinist metaphors of the New Right which it aims to supersede. But heavy instruments are perhaps required, and it might be said that it is Knight’s conviction that enables him to make his unique exploration from biology through archaeology to anthropology. Human cultures are pervaded with symbolic and mysterious meanings, and feminine images and rhythms have been repressed through most of history. When they surface, anthropologists are often at a loss, because these things seem to have so little purchase on the functioning of society around them. No one these days is satisfied with the idea that the awesome compilation of Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques is simply a matter of structured thinking. It was time that someone looked again at what is in these myths, and Knight’s resurrection of the collaborative and female in culture allows him to do this. He suggests a new way to think about a host of enigmas, from bloody snake images to rituals of the full moon, and for this daring we should certainly be grateful.

This book may be the most important ever written on the evolution of human social organization. It brings together observation and theory from social anthropology, primatology, and paleoanthropology in a manner never before equalled. The author, Chris Knight, who teaches social anthropology at the University of East London, is up to date on all these fields and has achieved an extraordinary synthesis. His critiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss on totemism and myth are a sheer tour de force. The basic premise can be summarised, though only in an extremely cursory fashion, as follows. The basis of primate social organization is predicated on the distribution of food resources and how many females array themselves around these. Males array themselves around females. Over the course of human evolution, the acquisition of animal protein came to be of critical significance. Proto-human females acquired this valuable resource from males via a collective bargaining agreement which formed the basis of human kinship organization and social exchanges. This accomplished through a systematic ‘sex-strike’ cycle which ran according to a lunar based schedule of menstruation/hunting following ovulation/feasting. Human females evolved concealed ovulation and a cultural system of sexual advertisement based on menstruation that guided this cycle. Females could now say ‘yes’, but they could also say ‘no’, depending on the success of the hunting venture. The author explores evidence for this thesis both in the ethnography of currently existing non-industrial societies as well as in the paleolithic in the use that anatomically modern humans made of red ochre and other pigments to signify and exploit the menstrual event. A number of previously incomprehensible myths, such as the ‘Rainbow Snake’ of the Australian Aborigines, receive a new and revealing interpretation in this light.

Professor Alex Walter, Rutgers University. Amazon.com book review. aewalter@hotmail.com

Chris Knight, University of East London, June 2003
Copyright: C. D. Knight, 1989.
Comment, information and/or criticism welcome.

First printing (fifty copies) November 1988.

Second printing (five hundred copies) September 1989.

Printed & Published in 1989 by Ian Watts, Radical Anthropology Group Publications, 58 Eastdown House, Amhurst Rd., London E8.

UNTIL ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, hunting was taken to be an early development in hominid evolution. Recent reinterpretations of the evidence, however, indicate how remarkably late it was before our ancestors succeeded in hunting effectively at all. It now appears that effective big game hunting did not get under way until well into the Middle Pleistocene. Those involved would have been neither Australopithecus nor Homo habilis but much later populations of Homo erectus and/or early Neanderthals. The earlier stages of hominid evolution were based on omnivorous foraging and the gathering of vegetable foods.

Why was the transition to big game hunting – and to the full elaboration of symbolic culture – so late? A contributing factor may have been that in experimenting with carnivory, our ancestors faced initially-severe problems in (a) organising the proper distribution of meat and (b) controlling the destructive potentialities of a weapons technology. Only once these problems had been solved can we speak of the emergence of “culture” in the full sense.

How was this tremendous leap made? What factors enabled an animal scarcely different in genetic terms from a chimpanzee to become Homo sapiens?

The selfish male?

Studies of baboons and chimpanzees – which occasionally kill small animals to eat – have often been used in constructing models of the origins of human hunting. But ape and monkey hunting-activity is overwhelmingly male, and – not surprisingly – it is the males who eat most of the meat. Females, relatively immobilised by their offspring, obtain rather little. If protohuman sociality was at first based upon some version of the “dominance” pattern of apes or baboons (as earlier theorists assumed), it is difficult to understand how females could have secured an adequate meat-supply.

In this context, to the extent that hunting began to matter as a potential food-source – which would certainly have been the case for later Ice Age populations migrating beyond the tropics – the females in each pre-cultural population (with their young) must initially have been discriminated against. Hunting would have contributed little to the survival-prospects of populations if males simply ate their own kills out in the bush, with females and offspring going hungry. At its worst – if chimpanzee aggression is anything to go by – we can even imagine a situation in which males armed with weapons used these not only for hunting but also for internal sexual threats, violence or murder.

In the past, male-centred solutions to such problems were thought to be sufficient. It was argued, for example, that if the hominid male were to become an effective hunter, he would have needed to learn cooperation. Further, if he were to immortalise his genes, he would have had to learn to bring meat to his offspring and mate. Such notions underlay the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis popular in the nineteen sixties. “The two-parent family”, “cooperation”, “the sexual division of labour” and much else seemed satisfactorily “explained” on this basis – all without crediting the female with any innovative, creatively active role. Despite changes in detail and in emphasis, recent discussions of human origins have generally been conducted within the parameters established by this hypothesis.

The argument had two major drawbacks. First, its findings did not sufficiently engage with those of social anthropologists (in fields such as the study of kinship, ritual or symbolism) for the model to act as an anthropological research guide. Social anthropologists, consequently – maintaining a tradition established at the turn of the century – felt justified in continuing to ignore evolutionary biology and theories of social origins.

Second, even on its own level, the theory left major problems unsolved. Granted that the hominid male “had to” learn to hunt effectively, the question remained: how did this come about? Dominant primate males – for example, chimpanzees and baboons – are impeded in hunting efficiently by the internal sexual structure of dominance, which sets the animals in conflict with one another and partially immobilises them by requiring each male’s round-the-clock physical attachment to “its own” females. A male which went off to hunt would risk losing its mate or mates to male sexual rivals during its absence. Until recently, it has not been clear how this particular problem could have been overcome.

Moreover, unlike wolves and hunting-dogs (which transport meat in their stomachs, regurgitating it for dependents in the den), non-human primate males seem to lack the necessary instincts to avoid on-the-spot “selfish” consumption of whatever food they find. Are we to assume that the protohuman male, unlike his non-human primate relatives, developed an instinct to carry meat home rather than eating it without delay? Is there such an instinct in the human male? And if not, what were the mechanisms through which this male’s “need” to provision his sexual partner became translated into normative cultural practice?

A human innovation: the “home base”

It is widely agreed that a crucial human evolutionary innovation was the establishment of a fixed “home base”. No monkey or ape has this facility. Chimpanzees, gorillas and other primates display different patterns, but in no instance do we find reproductively-active males who are free to leave “their” females in a home base whilst they depart to hunt. They would lose their females to rival males if they did leave. The absence of a home base makes it impossible for males to go in one direction in search of game while females and juveniles disperse to gather vegetable foods – a system of food-getting which seems universal as an option available to human hunter-gatherers.

Protohuman males, then, in evolving the institution of the home base, must have begun adopting a very different reproductive and foraging strategy from other primates, going away from “their” females for extended periods of time and returning later with meat. It is important to recognise the social and sexual correlates of such a change. It is in this context that the problems arise. Given the primacy of “dominance” relationships, how could hominid females have stayed away when “their” males went off to hunt? What would have induced the females to stay for long periods away from their dominant “protectors”? How could they have been sure that the males would return? And if the females were typically available as sexual/reproductive prizes to be competed for, how could the males have torn themselves away – even temporarily – from the mating-opportunities and the competition? Finally, let us suppose that despite all this, some males did manage to form into a co-operative band and then went off to hunt. How could these males have been sure that when they returned, “their” females would still have been “theirs”? What would have prevented rival males from taking advantage of the situation, dominating and claiming the unguarded females in their absence?

The “prostitution” hypothesis

Many writers have linked the home base with a sexual division of labour, inferring some kind of sexual and economic “trade-off” between the sexes. The assumption is that female sexual choice was important: males brought meat because there was no other way of securing sex with females. Males who failed would have reduced their chances of passing on their genes.

This idea implies that females favoured males who were good hunters, making sex dependent upon gifts of meat. Rightly or wrongly, this has been termed the “prostitution” theory of human origins: females “traded” their sexual favours for economic gain.

It has frequently been suggested that this pattern is quite normal in human hunter-gatherer societies. Sex and hunting are often intimately intertwined: women tend to link virility with hunting-prowess. A good hunter, in some communities, may be able to maintain simultaneous liaisons with several wives or mistresses who value his gifts of meat.

But let us explore the logic of this conception more closely. There are two possibilities. First, let us remain within the primate tradition of relations based on “dominance”. Imagine pre-cultural, protohuman females competing with one another in securing consortships with dominant, occasionally meat-eating males, trailing after these continuously in the hope of obtaining a share in their meat. Under these circumstances, the most adaptive male reproductive strategy would have been to attract females on this basis. Males would have had to move sufficiently slowly for “their” females and offspring to keep up with them. If and when they made a kill, they would have allowed such females to eat flesh on the spot in exchange for immediate sexual access.

The problems here are that (a) slow-moving, sexually-possessive, parentally-burdened males do not make the best hunters and (b) those females who remained “at home” during a hunt would have been furthest from the meat when a kill was made, and so would have been the least likely to receive a share. Since there would have been no selection pressures in favour of females “staying at home”, the home-base institution simply could not have evolved. A relatively successful category of meat-eating females might have come into existence – but this would have consisted of the non-pregnant, unburdened ones who could maximally protect their mobility, display their sexual attractions and trail along following the hunters. This would have been the opposite of what was required if a large-brained, neotenous, slow- developing hominid in need of prolonged nurturing was to reproduce and evolve.

The alternative: sexual morality

However, as noted, there would have been two logically-possible ways in which our female ancestors could have made sex dependent upon the availability of meat. Only one of these was the “prostitution” strategy of active, mobile soliciting in search of meat. The other would have been for females to stop where they were and compel the males to bring their kills home.

Let us provisionally assume that this second option was chosen, and follow the logic through. We can then test the resulting logically-deduced pattern in the light of the relevant evidence.

The second option implies a sex-strike. Females refuse to leave the home base, and refuse sex to any male who does not return “home” with meat.

Unlike the “yes”-strategy (continuously “presenting” to males in the hope of gaining favours), this “no”-strategy (refusing sex until males bring meat) implies inter-female solidarity. It would have been impossible for a female to use refusal as a means of putting pressure on one or more males unless she could rely on her sisters to back her up. To have allowed males to play off one female against another – to have allowed her sex-partner to turn elsewhere whenever she signalled “no” – would have undermined her completely. In other words, the “second option” female strategy required gender-solidarity for internal reasons, just as – by contrast – the “prostitution” strategy necessarily involved inter-female rivalry and competition within each gender-group. Assuming the second option, an implication is that whenever the male community was unsuccessful in obtaining meat – or whenever meat-supplies seemed dangerously low – the female community had to refuse all sexual favours. A ban on sexual relations – according to this model – would have been necessary as the prelude to each successful hunting-expedition; it would have been the means through which protowomen motivated males not only to hunt but also to concentrate their energies on bringing back the meat.

Kin selection

The concept of “inclusive fitness” is the core scientific insight around which the various claims of sociobiology have formed as accretions. It may be relevant in developing a model for the “second option” as outlined above.

Suppose that a particular gene conferred upon a female protohominid an unusual capacity for restraining her own sexuality, and that behaviourally this expressed itself in altruistic tendencies towards her sisters. It might be that hormonally-governed oestrus behaviour (see next section below) was in her case weaker than normal, so that when she was ovulating she was still able to avoid sex. Oestrus-loss of such a kind would have made it easier for her to refrain from sexual competition with her sisters. In the event that these were refusing a male’s sexual advances, it would have been easier for her to defend them, instead of undercutting her sisters by making advances herself. Such a hypothesised tendency would be “altruistic” in that it would mean incurring a cost (in terms of opportunities for personal reproductive success) to herself, and a similar benefit to her sister or sisters. Are there any circumstances under which such a gene could be favourably selected and thus increase in frequency over the generations?

Normally, we would expect any gene that risked damaging its carrier’s personal reproductive success to be selected against. However, in the case of altruism towards a sister, each recipient of the benefit would already have a chance of carrying a copy of the same gene as a result of descent from the same ancestor. To the extent that such were the case, the “altruistic gene” would really be doing what all genes must do to survive – namely, helping its own replication. The daughters (or sons) of a hominid mother carrying such a gene would have no more probability of carrying that gene than would the mother’s full siblings. From the gene’s point of view, therefore, it would be as useful for the mother to risk her future reproductive success in defending her sister as to risk it in defending her offspring. To the extent that a sister’s child-bearing years were still ahead of her, the gene’s future would be fostered by that route just as effectively. It is in fact on such a basis that sociobiologists account for the well-documented phenomenon of sibling-solidarity in group-living monkeys, both in peaceful activities such as grooming, and also in coming to the aid of brothers and sisters under attack.

The relevance of this to the above model will be appreciated. Kin selection can account for a degree of biological sibling solidarity as a genetically viable aspect of reproductive strategy. If for various reasons such solidarity among protohumans could have developed to the point at which related females supported one another in asserting themselves sexually as “on strike”, the threshold of culture might have been reached before being crossed.

Loss of oestrus

It is a suggestion which facilitates an elegant solution to an old problem – that of oestrus loss in the human female.

In non-human primates, the female experiences a hormonally-governed strong impulse to copulate during ovulation – when she is in oestrus. The moment is publicly announced, each female signalling her enhanced receptivity to males. While in some species such signals are purely behavioural, in others they also take the form of visible swelling of the genital region, changes in colouring of the sexual skin, scent-emissions and so on.

Accentuated oestrus-displays are related in an obvious way to inter-female sexual competition for consortships with dominant males. They may be regarded as uncontrollable, involuntary “yes”-signals sent out by females around the period when they are most likely to conceive. No mature male in the vicinity can resist the temptations of a female in such a state.

In human females, the “yes”-signal has been lost. Instead of being externally displayed, ovulation has evolved in the reverse direction, to the point at which the crucial moment has become effectively concealed. In neither appearance nor behaviour is it possible to determine a human female’s fertile period. Far from males in her presence being made publicly aware of her ovulation, the human female’s special condition is kept so close a secret that unless she is unusually aware of her own physiology she will not even know the moment herself.

Moreover, the human is in principle sexually receptive throughout the whole of her cycle. Despite possible slight peaks at ovulation and/or following menstruation, her interest in sex never becomes as overwhelming as it is for primates in oestrus. Being able to “say ‘No” at any time, she is never the slave of her hormonal state.

Yet hormonally-controlled sexual signals are not entirely missing, for menstruation in the human case has been accentuated as an external display. A woman loses considerably more menstrual blood than does any other primate. Although there is no biological imperative to avoid sex during this period, in traditional human cultural contexts, menstruation almost always signals “sex strike” or “no”. Explaining the accentuation of menstruation in humans has presented as great a challenge to biologists as accounting for the elimination of oestrus.

We can sum up by saying that taking together (1) oestrus-loss, (2) accentuated menstruation and (3) continuous sexual receptivity, the human configuration in these respects is not just different from the usual primate pattern: it displays the inverse image of it. Whereas the basic primate pattern is to deliver a periodic “yes”-signal against a background of continuous sexual “no”, the human one is to emit a periodic “no”-signal against a background of continuous availability or “yes”.

Loss of oestrus: a product of female solidarity

This Inversion can be simply explained.

Picture a protohuman population adopting the strategy of the periodic sexual strike. What might be the effects of this new social and sexual logic on the female cycle?

Whilst we have supposed a periodic on/off sexual alternation embodied in the “sex-strike”, it must be remembered that the reproductive cycle is itself already a periodic on/off alternation in terms of reproductive receptivity. How do these two rhythms interrelate? Or to ask thisanother way: At which point in their menstrual cycles would evolving protohuman females have been best advised to go “on strike”?

According to the initial premises of the sex-strike model, the overriding consideration in determining the moment and duration of any period of celibacy would have been economic. Fertility would not have been a consideration: if there was no meat, there had to be no sex, and the “sex-strike” had to last until the hunt had been successfully completed and meat brought home. The whole point of the action would have been undermined were it necessary to end it at a certain moment on hormonal grounds, regardless of whether the males had brought meat or not.

Under such conditions, it would have become particularly important during each sex strike – no matter when this occurred nor how long it had to last – for each woman to display solidarity with her sisters by showing not the slightest sign of sexual flirtatiousness or desire. Each strike would have demanded a “united front” against all male potential sexual partners. Had one woman involuntarily displayed signs of inappropriately-timed sexual interest, she would have aroused the antagonism of her sisters. It can be seen at once that such a situation would have demanded of each woman that her moment of ovulation be kept as secret and private as possible. Within the population, then, the sex-strike would have sought out those females best able to adapt to its requirements. Those with strong oestrus-patterns would have tended to reject the new system or be rejected by it; those with weaker oestrus would more easily have thrived.

From this point of view, the evolving human female had to gain increasing control over herself. She could no longer afford to be chained down by her hormones. If the males in her life were unco-operative, they had to be coaxed, persuaded or otherwise dealt with – no matter what her cyclical state happened to be. If they were lazy or failed in the hunt, they had to be treated coldly. Each female, linking up with others, had to control her own sexual inclinations and participate in controlling those of her sisters.

To the extent that hunting was a chancy business, this ruled out any fixed time for sexual activity. Females would have needed the power to say “no” at any time and for as long a period as necessary. By the same token, they would have needed the freedom to say “yes” at any time, too, since no-one could have predicted the moment of the hunt’s successful conclusion. Continuous receptivity and an equally continuous ability to say “no” are requirements with a basis in physiology; over a period, given the logic of the strike, the necessary physiology would have evolved.

Biological and cultural perlodicity: one rhythm or two?

Freedom from hormonal control, then, was the initial precondition if the “sex-strike” was to work. In the long term, however, the entire strategy would have been beset with reproductive problems unless there were harmony between the periodic sex-strike and the periodicity of the menstrual cycle. Females would otherwise have risked being on strike during their fertile periods and available when they were infertile.

Assume, now, an Ice Age population in which the “no”-strategy has been in operation for some time – tens of thousands of years, perhaps. Assume that big-game hunting has been developed to a fine art, that game is abundant and that each hunting-expedition can in general be counted on to produce results. If all this were the case, then the very success of the new strategy would make it possible for a new stability to emerge. Females would not have to organise sex-strikes on the spur of the moment, knowing neither the likely duration of each action nor its prospects of success. Whilst retaining as a fall-back option the ability to say “No” at any time, in practice, as a normal rule, they would be able to settle down into a regular, predictable pattern whose features we may now predict.

In the long run, a balance had to be struck between two great rhythms and two corresponding imperatives – cultural/economic on the one hand, natural/reproductive on the other. The impact of the first imperative – the principle that without meat there could be no sex – was immediate, operating on the level of conscious female will and decision. It was an economic rhythm and determinant, which on any particular occasion had to take precedence over all others. The second – sex must be permitted during the fertile period – was a biological, natural constraint, and acted as a determinant only in the longer term, at a level beyond that of conscious decision-making or will. On no particular occasion could it be allowed to impose itself as the overriding consideration (that would have implied a return to oestrus-behaviour); yet over a period its demands could not be escaped. In terms of striking a balance, the most perfectly adaptive outcome would have been one in which the cultural on/off alternation of the hunt exactly matched the natural on/off alternation of the female reproductive cycle. Since the menstrual cycle cannot be stretched or telescoped from month to month so as to fit in with hunting contingencies, the only long-term solution was to establish some compatible regularity in the hunt itself. It is here suggested that such a solution was found. Where technology, the abundance of game, a climate permitting the cold storage of meat and other factors made it possible for monthly extended hunting-expeditions to be predictably successful and to suffice, the necessary conditions for harmony in at least certain localities or for certain periods would have been met.

To the extent that an adaptive balance between the two great imperatives was struck, then, harmony would have been achieved – if not perfectly, then at least as a tendency. In this context, just as the females would have been able to bring their periodic, hormonally liberated “no” increasingly into phase with the menstrual flow, so they could have been quite liberated about saying “yes”, making this dependent not on fertility but on success in the hunt – and yet able to time their period of sexual activity on most occasions so as to overlap with their fertile period. Women would then have got the best of both worlds. Of necessity they would have liberated themselves from hormonal control, retaining the fall-back option of being able to say “No” at any time – but they would have done this only to re-establish a normative attunement with their cycles now on another level, as an expression of collective will – setting up a rhythmic pattern in which the whole of culture now participated. In those localities where conditions best permitted such an outcome, our ancestors would have been particularly successful, both in passing on their genetic characteristics and in extending the hegemony of their cultural configuration, which would eventually have become the dominant culture of humanity – leaving its traces, therefore, in all subsequent cultural traditions.

The human female reproductive cycle: conclusion

In evaluating the selection-pressures shaping evolution of the human female reproductive cycle, we have examined a cultural/economicdeterminant in the form of the “logic of the strike”, and a natural/reproductive one stipulating that despite everything, fertile sex must still occur. The combined effects of these two kinds of determinants may now be summarised. Every female risked being occasionally out-of- phase. But pronounced menstruation at the “wrong” moment, however embarrassing, was not nearly so serious a risk as untimely oestrus-signalling. To have allowed even one female’s oestrus-signalling to have ended a collective sex strike at the “wrong” moment would have been potentially disastrous. To reduce the risk of this to nil, such signalling had to be eliminated altogether. By contrast, the opposite “mistake” – bleeding during what for others was the fertile period – may have been inconvenient for the individual concerned, arousing social unease and proving reproductively maladaptive in the long term, but it would not have undermined the entire cultural enterprise in so direct a way. It would have been tolerable on occasion, provided it did not settle down into becoming the normative, regular pattern. While oestrus-signalling simply had to go, then, it was affordable for menstrual signalling to be strong and even to become accentuated (for reasons to be discussed) despite some risk of its being occasionally out of phase.

In terms of female biological evolution, then, the sex-strike hypothesis would lead us to expect selective pressures towards (a) a capacity for menstrual synchrony (b) continuous sexual availability, (c) enhanced cortical control over sexuality (d) the complete elimination of oestrus behaviour and oestrus-signalling and (e) accentuated menstrual bleeding in the human female. These are precisely the features which we do find.

With its emphasis on “No” or “negativity”, the model would also predict that the main impact of any hormonal surges in determining female behaviour would peak around the “negative” pole of the cycle – indicating refusal, irritability, or “rebellion” rather than accentuated marital availability or desire for sexual “surrender”. “Premenstrual tension” confirms this prediction nicely. We may think of it as a physiological trace – still operative amongst women today – of earliest Womankind’s struggle to assert the power of her sex strike. It is interesting to speculate what might be the creative forms taken by such “irritability” or “unpredictability” in cultures which endorsed women’s periodicity rather than demanding its denial or suppression.

Cultural selection – the logic of the strike

In principle, it would only have needed two females – perhaps sisters, or mother-and-daughter – to have set in train the movement towards culture as an unstoppable force. Let us suppose that the two females supported each other, acted in concert, and began to synchronise their menstrual cycles – a phenomenon which would have tended to occur spontaneously. If these females were able to motivate two or more males to hunt for them by making sex dependent on hunting-success, then they might have been unusually successful in securing meat – much more so than other females in the population. In that event, their strategy might have seemed an attractive model for other females to follow, any genetic characteristics facilitating such solidarity gradually spreading through the population.

Unlike other “family” units in the population, such a unit would have been capable of recruiting new members almost indefinitely. There are limits to the viable size or territorial range of any primate-type horde or other grouping, but with a strike – the bigger the better. Strike action cuts across parochial boundaries spontaneously and of necessity. The striking group would have had a powerful motive to extend its Influence and recruit, since with each sex-strike – as with any strike, including within contemporary culture – there could have been no tolerance of neutrality. If the surrounding females could not be brought into the strike, then they were a threat to it. Every female encountered by any male was potentially on one “side” or the other. And the more females brought into the fold, the more powerful the strike on each occasion, and the greater the attractions of joining the movement next time.

Moreover, the females adopting the new strategy would have been linked not to one or more dominant Individual males but to an immeasurably more effective force, both for hunting and defence. In addition to links with offspring or biological kin, the females would have been attached sexually to a male group whose capacity for joint action would have far exceeded that of unorganised males still prioritising their Individualistic struggles for status, sex and food. The band of hunter-males, like the females, could not have been indifferent to the behaviour of the surrounding male population. Any male who could not be recruited into the new-strategy hunting-band would have constituted a potential danger. The dominant individual male, the loner or the rapist would have seemed a sexual threat. Any—

of such males as were unable to co-operate with the new strategy would have been treated in principle like any other animal predator – chased away, wounded or possibly killed. In any event, where conflicts occurred, no violent male would have been able to match the coercive power of the organised, sexually-motivated hunting-band. The traditional male sexual strategy of immortalising one’s genes through competitive assertions of dominance would no longer have worked. And if this were the case, then the cultural configuration – once established – would have spread through the protohuman population rapidly, sweeping all before its path and precipitating the extinction of all competing hominid groups unable to adopt the new way of life.

The universe of rules

The females in any hypothesised protohuman population would have been divided into (a) those more liable to “break ranks” and mate regardless of their sisters’ feelings and (b) those more liable to form coalitions with other females, following the “sex-strike” strategy, placing pressure on other females to follow suite and submitting to similar pressures themselves. Of these two female types, there seems little question as to which would most plausibly have led social life towards culture. We need hardly ask which would most have needed new communicative skills or which would have been most receptive, potentially, to the notion of a “rule”. Assuming that some accident made it temporarily possible to control fire, it seems unnecessary to ask which females would have been most likely to succeed in keeping it alight. And assuming that the complex of activities implied above – speaking, rule-making, fire-tending, hunting etc. – represented a viable mode of production, and that individually or competitively- obtainable food-resources were scarce, it is clear which category of females would have succeeded in producing the most surviving offspring.

The sex-strike would have provided the most fundamental and obvious feature of human culture, and the one which underlies all the capabilities for joint action which have been suggested above – the fact that it is based on rule. Here, the crucial point is not whether conventionalised patterns of behaviour exist. Such patterns, which can perhaps misleadingly be called “rules” by external scientific observers, are discernible throughout the animal world. Baboons and chimpanzees behave In predictable ways, according to conventionalised patterns determined both genetically and in complex interplay with the social and external environment. But this has nothing to do with “rules” as defined here.

A cultural rule exists when there is genuinely collective agreement to secure adherence to it. Where the rule is concerned, indifference, tolerance and neutrality are of necessity abandoned. Every individual who has entered the agreement has to submit to its terms. A violation outrages the community as a whole.

Such a situation does not prevail among non-human primates. To touch on a central issue – that of incest in sexual relations – imagine a dominant male gorilla with three females. Two of these are his daughters. The question is not whether he has sexual relations with all three. That would be a matter of behaviour – not of rule. The question is: in the event of this male’s attempting such relations, what would be the reaction of the other gorillas in the wider “community”? Would they express some gorilla version of collective moral outrage?

We can only answer negatively. Although one or other neighbouring gorilla might feel aggrieved, the surrounding society as such would simply show indifference, leaving individuals to get on with things as best they could in their own way, each basically preoccupied with its own affairs.

Primate “society” in this sense does not exist. Admittedly, individual primates in a local community may take sides, involve themselves in others’ affairs, express “anger” and attempt to involve allies in their emotions or schemes – but despite all this there is no over-arching collective body which makes it its business to interfere with its members’ private affairs. Although coalitions (as among chimpanzees) may come into being, they are formed around dominant or threatened individuals seeking immediate advantage for themselves, and allegiances and coalition-boundaries shift as perceptions of self-interest change. The result is that individuals are left to follow the possibilities opened up by social interaction; they do what they can get away with doing. There is certainly no collectivity which endures beyond and despite the flux of alliances and coalitions between Individuals. No social group can be relied upon either to arbitrate impartially or to assert the validity or otherwise of universally- acknowledged categories of behaviour. There exists, consequently, no collectively-imposed system of constraints, no supra-individual force to impose sanctions – no “rule”, no “law”. We can put this another way by saying that in chimpanzee society, coalitions indeed form – but every coalition is always sectional, opportunistic and unstable, none being capable of embodying “society” as a whole.

Human culture – in its traditional forms particularly – is above all the “rule of law” in this sense: that the behaviour-patterns culture prescribes emanate from a source beyond instinct and beyond private enforcement by coalitions or individuals. In a human cultural system with its harmonising collective rituals and its formal structures of kinship we find something which transcends the parochial, petty level of interaction to which primates are confined. Beyond all private coalitions or alliances is a wider one – a set of shared understandings uniting the community as a whole. Whilst it is true that practical experience falls short of ideals, and that “complex” societies are indeed characteristically conflict-ridden, the fact remains that shared perceptions and understandings are what language, ritual and culture in its traditional forms are essentially about. No hunter-gatherer community, in any event, can be understood without reference to this level of its being, which tends to be the most meaningful for its members themselves. And it is surely inconceivable that primate “dominance” could have led to such a level. It could never have led to shared symbol and rite, because – with its roots in the dominance of private interest – it could never have led to a sufficiently wide and representative coalition. It could not have sustained the wholly- necessary element of collective responsibility and collective intolerance which characterises human cultural rule-making at its best – intolerance of rape, of murder, of incestuous abuse, of anti-social greed.

Dominance is from this perspective the antithesis of culture. It is the pseudo-law, the pseudo-order of alliances in the service of private interest and force – the patterned, structured outcome of self-seeking interaction based on inducement, threat and fear. Despite all the subtleties of social interaction which primatologists understandably celebrate, and despite whatever glimpses there may be of generous and sharing behaviour, the popular conception of “jungle law” retains its essential validity in this respect. Except to the extent that genetic relatedness motivates “altruism”, such a situation leads each individual to look to itself, to attempt to bend others to its private interests (interpretable ultimately as those of its genes) and to display ultimate indifference to the fate of the wider community of which it is a part. There is no way that this could have led to culture – except along the road of revolutionary, point-by-point negation and transcendence of its deepest logic.

On the other hand, if we are looking for a source of collective, impersonal intolerance leading to the “universe of rules”, we can have no better model than that of the strike. Like chimpanzee alliances, the strike is a coalition. But it is a coalition with a difference. The strike by its very nature undermines the dominance of private interest. It has its own logic, sweeping along individuals caught up in its current. It cannot be indifferent. It must impose “the law” – its own law of solidarity – with intolerance, its survival depending on it. It has to extend, intrude, embrace and include ever more widely to avoid being thrown into reverse. And yet the strike-concept avoids the anti-Darwinian mysticism or veiled theologism which has accompanied previous attempts to assert in humanity a spiritual, moral or psychological uniqueness demarcating us from the animal realm. We are not required to assume anything genetically or socially unrealistic in terms of altruism or morality. The individual seeks her/his material interests – which may well include those of reproduction and genetic self-perpetuation – through those of the collectivity which is involved in the strike. At this point, kin selection indeed transcends itself, for in principle the striking individual must be motivated to defend and identify equally with all “kin” – who must now be defined as all those involved in the strike – instead of discriminating in favour of those genetically most “close”. The model leads us to the concept of culture because it provides a realistic framework within which biological interests can finally transcend themselves – a point of intersection at which genetic, personal and collective interests can be experienced to coincide.

Sexual morality

Baboons and chimpanzees show no trace of sexual morality. A female chimpanzee may be coy or withdrawn, but she shows no sexual embarrassment or shame. Whether she engages in intercourse may depend on many factors. But in deciding whether there exists “sexual morality” or not, the question is not whether any male may come up and start to copulate – sometimes he will be invited, sometimes he will not. Neither is “coyness” relevant – in all animal species, courting-behaviour takes place, and one or other participant may often play at being hard to catch. In determining the presence or absence of sexual morality, we have to ask a different question. Suppose that a primate female made it clear that whenever she was receptive physiologically, males in general were welcome publicly to examine her intimate regions, to compete for intimate contact or copulate with her at will, regardless of what other females felt about this. What would be the attitude of her sisters? Would they feel undermined by her? Would they try to exert pressure on her not to be so “loose”?

There are no social conditions under which they would do this. Female chimpanzees cannot collectively judge or shape sexual behaviour. The necessary element of unanimity is always lacking. Could sufficient unanimity be achieved, the result would be a chimpanzee version of the cultural institution known as human sexual morality.

The sex-strike gives us such conditions. From the moment when two or more protohuman females went “on strike”, supporting one another in the maintenance of such action, the context of their sexuality had become transformed. Each may not have been motivated to wear a pubic covering or clothes. But no longer could she in public do with her body as she liked. Each had to take account of her sisters, whose responses would have been shaped by the requirements of their own solidarity. All around her, then, was a set of collective constraints. Sexual behaviour was now in moral terms either “right” or “wrong”. Even a private act of love-making, far away in some secluded spot, could now be viewed as a wrong directed against all if it undermined what was supposed to be a general sexual strike.

Such morality was all-intrusive. By going on strike, the females were extending their claims ever outwards, stretching their influence into all corners of life, exerting a collective stake in the value which their sexuality now represented for them. Such collective sexual self-control – which is the antithesis of primate oestrus-behaviour – was the source of their pride, their status as women, their economic and social power. Each female could no longer allow her instincts to carry her where they would. As a sexual being, she was an asset to her gender-group as a whole. Her body was no longer just that of a physical individual. It was the incarnation of something collective, something universal – or, to use the terminology of later religions, something “divine”. It was part of the most precious, irreplaceable, inviolable treasure of all – the body of Womankind, which was to be guarded against all male attempts at seduction or privatisation.

The strike not only generates female sexual morality. It also gives us male morality as its mirror-image. For once two or more males were acting as co-operative hunters, respecting the inviolability of their sexual partners’ periodic strike, they too, by the internal logic of the situation, would have felt threatened by any male defiance of the rules. Without vigilant self-defence against the spectre of the dominant male, they might have lost their women. Before the whole community headed for starvation following cultural collapse, the members of the hunting-band would have become sexually expropriated – reduced, perhaps, to something like the status of baboon-like “bachelor males” excluded from access to females by a few dominant “overlords”. Such, in any event, might have been the fear. It was this tangible collective fear which gave force to the men’s moral vigilance.

The hunters’ new sexual security rested on an inversion of previous patterns of female mate-selection. What females found sexually appealing in males now was neither aggressiveness nor dominance, but adherence to rule and success in co-operative hunting. This pattern, although logical under the new circumstances, was not “natural”. It was a reversal of the usual higher primate pattern, and could be sustained by each individual woman only to the extent that she felt herself to be in a wider system which worked and which validated her choice. It could easily be undermined: Indeed, given a few males’ success in breaking women’s resistance, individual females might quickly revert to the search for dominance in sexual partners. The dominance-suppressing band of males, in other words, had as great a collective interest as the females in upholding the new order at all points. With “the human revolution”, they had won for themselves collective sexual security – without struggles for dominance, without “haves” and “have nots”, without fear of complete sexual expropriation. It was a treasure they could not afford to lose.

Incest and exogamy

The sex-strike model not only gives us sexual morality in a general sense. It also accounts for the incest taboo. No other postulated starting-point can account for the emergence of the fully-cultural incest taboo so simply and neatly. We are not asked to believe that female protohumans at a certain stage began complicating life by adding an “incest taboo” to the already-existing configuration of artificial constraints. Still less need we follow Levi- Strauss in postulating (as he does in The Elementary Structures of Kinship) the sudden appearance of sexual generosity and altruism on the part of woman-exchanging groups of dominant males.

The sex-strike inhibited the sexual advances of stay-at-home, non-hunting males – of all such males, regardless of status or affiliation. There could be no sex except with males who brought meat. By remaining faithful to this principle even with regard to their own immature male offspring, the females involved were simplifying life, not complicating it. The inhibition of young males’ “incestuous” advances was the result. In other words, the “incest rule” is explained as the sex-strike when experienced from within – by male offspring who participate in the solidarity of the strike. Women’s imposition of this rule is not a separate “thing”: it is their refusal or inability to threaten the strike or otherwise complicate matters by making an “exception” of stay-at-home sons.

Let us review the picture which the model outlines. The females are on sex-strike. They are insisting that adult hunter-males separate themselves off and go out to hunt. These males will not go unless they are secure in the knowledge that the strike applies to all those of their gender without favour or discrimination – and in particular that the females will remain during their absence in control of the situation back at home. They need to know that no young males left behind, for example, will be allowed to gain the upper hand in securing sexual relations with any female. As part of their sex-strike, then, the females must inhibit their sons and show that yielding sexually to them would be unthinkable.

To the extent that sexual freedom in relations with their mothers/sisters is impossible, the young males in each group become conditioned against perceiving “their own” women as potential sexual partners. They therefore look elsewhere for partners as they mature. They cannot join the hunting-band of their fathers, for that would involve difficulties with their own conditioning. It would mean sharing in their fathers’ solidarity and therefore thinking the unthinkable – seeing their mothers/sisters as women to whom gifts of meat are brought in expectation of sexual rewards. So they must either join another hunting band, or – if none exists – form one of their own. There must be, then, at least two hunting bands whose identities and solidarities are counterposed. Men can join one or the other, but not both. The cleavage between “fathers” and “sons” exists already; we have only to assume its permanence for the necessary dual organisation – the requisite division of the male community into two counterposed camps, each with its own internal solidarity – to come into view.

The recently-matured hunters seek sexual relations outside the community of their own women. But which other women exist within the system for them to turn to? There is an answer. Their fathers must have been nurtured in a female group of mothers and sisters with whom sexual freedom was (for these “fathers”) “unthinkable”. In seeking sexual relations, the sons must turn, therefore (since there are no other women in the system) to this female group. Assuming that they seek partners of their own generation, the sons will in fact relate to the daughters of this group – “fathers’ sisters’ daughters”, who would also be “mothers’ brothers’ daughters”. In other words, the model has generated the standard anthropological form of a matrilineal exogamous moiety system, in which marriage is with classificatory cross-cousins.

The role of “brothers”

The exogamy rule would in turn have buttressed the sex-strike power of women. On condition that women retained internal ascendancy within each sex-striking unit, it would now have been possible to draw on male offspring, as these grew up, as an important resource. A potential rapist would have encountered a group of mothers, sisters, daughters and their male kin acting together in maintaining the inviolability of each strike. To the extent that offspring could not constitute sexual threats themselves, every woman would have been able to call on a son or brother to assist her in fighting off a sexual threat. This would have meant that whilst asserting themselves as “on strike”, women would have gained repossession of their male kin at the very moment of maximum disjunction from men as marital partners – in a sense replacing one kind of partner with another. For the moment, kinship relations would have overridden relations of sex. Consequently, as the men went off to hunt, women would not have needed to remain at the home-base entirely without male protection. They could always have arranged for some men – sons and brothers – to stay behind, children would have had as their guardians not only their mothers but also their mothers’ brothers. Such collaboration between male and female siblings, as is well-known, is a characteristic feature of hunter-gatherer and other traditional cultures.

Classificatory kinship

The model specifically generates “classificatory” kinship – the kind of kinship-logic characteristic of most hunter-gatherer and other traditional cultures.

The essence of this is that siblings occupy similar positions in the total social structure. If a woman has a relationship, any of her sisters may in theory join her in exercising the rights or fulfilling the obligations which that relationship entails. As far as formal structuring is concerned (actual behaviour being ignored here for the sake of argument), she may stand in for her sister (just as any of her sisters may stand in for her) in any kinship capacity, whether it be it as mother to her (the sister’s) child, as mother-in-law to her sister’s daughter’s husband – or even, theoretically, as wife to a sister’s husband. Moreover, since sisters are each other’s “equivalents”, it follows that theoretically, no mother should discriminate in favour of her own biological children as opposed to those of her sister. All of their joint children are addressed as “daughter” or “son” Indiscriminately, and all are in theory collectively “sisters” and “brothers” to each other – which is an example of what anthropologists mean when they say that people who use a classificatory system, such as the Australian Aborigines, do not recognize physiological but only social relationships. Over the generations, the class of people who can be considered theoretically one’s “sisters” (or “brothers”) may expand indefinitely.

Classificatory kinship seems puzzling to Europeans because the ego or “I” is not its point of departure. Neither is the “two-parent family”. Although such kinship does not eliminate intimacy or individuality, it operates on another level – a level at which group-to-group relationships have primacy over personal interests or bonds. On this level, there is a profoundly meaningful sense in which it really does not matter who the individual is. What matters is everyone’s participation in the collective identity of a class of people in similar positions, each category or class defining itself through its relationships with other classes. This, it will be remembered, is a fundamental feature of our sex strike model, in which the women as a whole say “yes” or “no” in relating collectively to their sexual partners taken as a whole.

The Moon

It is a mysterious but undeniable fact that all over the world, hunting traditions link success in the chase with the moon. Whereas agricultural peoples ascribe centrality to seasonal changes and to the sun in their symbolic systems, hunters usually view the moon as having the greater status and power. Throughout Aboriginal Australia, for example, the moon is considerably more important mythologically than the sun; the same applies to most of the Bushman cultures of southern Africa. Hunting-magic is very frequently linked with the moon, as when hunters pray to the moon for good luck; it is virtually unknown for the sun to play such a role. At first sight, all of this appears puzzling: in real life, humans tend to hunt in broad daylight, so that moonlight seems in material terms irrelevant.

But there is an explanation. Humans have poor nocturnal vision. Logically, this ought to be a disadvantage to any hunting animal. Stealth is never easiest in daylight; the techniques of deception intrinsic to the hunt are most effective in darkness or in the twilight hours. Wolves, foxes, cats and most other carnivorous animals hunt by night. A carnivore rigidly restricted to daylight hours would be unusual in nature and would not make a competitive hunter. Many models of early human hunting envisage trailing after prey animals – perhaps slightly wounded – for hours or even days until they are finally exhausted. It would be a handicap if the chase always had to be abandoned at dusk, sometimes allowing the victim to escape. In short: although early humans would have preferred to hunt in daylight, flexibility would have paid dividends. Those hunters who could on occasion travel overnight or extend the hunt into the twilight hours would have fared better than those who could not.

When the moon is full, the fears of the dark which most humans display are minimised and nocturnal travel becomes possible. The moon may therefore have been important to our ancestors not because hunting in our case was ever exclusively nocturnal, but because for several days once per month, its light extended our options, enabling us to choose between or combine diurnal and nocturnal hunting. Archaeological discoveries of Upper Palaeolithic lunar calendars may be relevant in this context. There is certainly no shortage of contemporary ethnographic evidence showing that where traditional peoples travel or hunt by night – as they often must – the moon’s light is much valued.

For solid material reasons, in any event, it would have been convenient – if hunting expeditions were to be organised once per human biological (“menstrual”) month – for this rhythm to coincide, normatively, with the periodicity of the moon. Besides other advantages, the visible moon would have provided an obvious “clock”, visible to everyone, by reference to which to synchronise hunting-schedules with the menstrual cycle. In this context, we could predict that the human female menstrual cycle, unlike that of chimpanzees, baboons and most other primates, should have an average periodicity of 29.5 days – exactly matching that of the moon. This, of course, is the case.

The discovery of fire

Among. the technological preconditions required by the novel system, two stand out in prominence. At the start of the human revolution came the mastery of artificial tools – the basket, digging-stick, wooden club, thrown stone or pointed stick. Towards the close of the revolution – as perhaps the culminating technological event of the hominisation process – came the mastery of fire. Primitive mythologies the world over repeatedly emphasise that humans differ from animal carnivores in eating their meat properly cooked.

In the earliest stages, protohuman males might often have “discovered” fire. They may sometimes have tasted meat which had been accidentally cooked – as a prey animal was occasionally trapped in a naturally-caused blaze. Most theoretical speculations on the discovery of fire indeed assume such an event, and then go on to infer that “man”, because of his large brain, would have realised the advantages to be gained from cooking raw meat, whereupon the domestication of fire would have been an obvious logical step.

In reality, accidental discoveries of fire or of cooking would not necessarily have been relevant. Preserving and reproducing fire – not just finding it – was the crucial challenge, and this demanded certain social and sexual preconditions, not just intellectual ones. Fire-tending could not successfully have been left to males, whose priority was and had to be the hunt, and for whom freedom of movement had to remain the paramount consideration. Wherever a man was the temporary sole custodian of a fortunately-discovered fire, we can imagine him all too often chasing after an animal only to drop the brand or to return hours later to find the embers extinguished by a shower. The only safe way to preserve a flame which had been found would have been to stay with it at all costs, perhaps taking turns to sleep – and certainly watching it, feeding it and defending it against all dangers at all times, night and day.

On any interpretation of early humanity’s sexual division of labour, it is impossible to square such responsibilities with the roles traditionally allocated to men. Essentially, fire as a preserved, controlled resource presupposed the institution of the fixed home base. Not until the camp was permanently occupied could there be any hope of keeping alight whatever fire-brands were temporarily seized. We can safely infer that only the female sex, once freed from the necessity to roam perpetually with the males, could have been positioned to meet this scale of challenge.

Millennia would elapse between the first culturally-preserved tradition of fire-tending on the one hand, and the discovery of how to make fire on the other. In the meantime, the home-base and fire would have been virtually synonymous, neither being able to exist without the other. Anyone wanting fire would have been compelled to return home to get it. The likelihood of being able simply to light up a fire while out in the bush would have been remote. And from this, an important consequence would have flowed: no hunter could have got his meat cooked without first taking the kill home.

The raw and the cooked

This brings us to one of the theory’s most intriguing implications, which will generate fine-grain predictions as to the range of variability of mythico-ritual structures the world over. The “raw and the cooked” is one of a small number of logical structures which have been shown by Claude Lévi-Strauss to underly the mythological systems of both North and South America. A materialist explanation for such structural uniformities will now be suggested.

Within the specifications of the model, men’s task was to kill game; women’s was to act as guardians of the fires needed for cooking the meat. The connection with menstrual blood-symbolism can now be clarified. The contrast between men’s roles and women’s can be defined in relation to blood: while men in general monopolised the weapons necessary for the shedding of animal blood, women monopolised the fire necessary to remove visible blood from meat.

In this context we can discern the outlines of an extraordinarily coherent symbolic system. Women’s monthly periodic sex-strike, it has been have suggested, was normatively synchronised with the onset of menstruation. Menstrual bleeding, in other words, signalled to men a sexual “No”. I will now outline what I believe must have been the symbolic correlates of this.

Somehow, it became established that blood was simply blood. That is, it made no difference where the blood came from: it was conceptually all the same. The blood of murder, the blood of the hunt, the blood of menstruation or of childbirth: it was all in the final analysis just blood. We can speculate as to the intellectual processes involved in making this identification. We can describe it as metaphor, perhaps, or as analogy. What is important is that once the confusion or merging had been accomplished an extraordinary result would have been achieved. If the preceding arguments in connection with menstruation are accepted, then no substance could have been equated with menstrual blood without the most potent of consequences in evoking “respect” or in conveying “power”.

Once the blood of the hunt had been likened to menstrual blood, a symbolic breakthrough would have been made. At a stroke, women would have achieved a radical simplification of some of life’s most pressing problems. No more could men feel at ease about eating an animal raw, out in the bush – even if no-one were looking. Each time a group of men killed an animal, its flesh would have seemed to them to “menstruate”. The men would have had to take it home in order to get the flesh cooked, the visible blood removed, and the meat thereby rendered safe to eat. In other words, the same blood-symbol through which women temporarily separated themselves from men would have functioned on an economic level as well, temporarily separating game animals from their potential consumers. The equation of blood with blood would have extended women’s blood-symbolised sex-strike to the world of consumption generally, so that whilst blood of any kind was flowing, abstinence had to be observed not only with regard to sex but with regard to meat-eating, too.

Once men’s meat had been brought home for cooking, it would have entered the feminine sphere. We can imagine, perhaps, large earth-ovens filled with hot stones into which the game was put. To the extent that the blood in the meat was “like” menstrual blood, the ovens may have been perceived as “like” immense wombs in which a transformative process was taking place. In the case of a large animal – such as a mammoth – the cooking may have lasted many hours. The test of whether the meat was finally ready or not would have been a simple one: Was the blood in it still visible? If it was, the oven had yet more work to do. If no blood could be seen, the cooking-process had been completed – whereupon eating could safely begin.

Specifications of the lunar model

It is exciting to discover that myths and fairy tales familiar to us both in our own culture and from ethnographic accounts can be understood as expressions of this logic. Before it is possible to explain this, however, it will be necessary to describe in greater detail the cultural norms which the sex-strike strategy would have generated. Some of the detailed specifications of the resulting model – details such as the precise relationship between cooking-time and women’s menstrual onsets – may at first sight seem puzzling; their bearing on the study of ritual and myth will become clear as we proceed.

Just as, earlier, it was deduced that any periodic sex-strike must have synchronised with the menstrual flow, so now we must assume that the periodicities of the moon and of the cooking-process – the alternation of the moon between “dark” and “light”, and of edible flesh between “raw” and “cooked” phases – were rhythms capable of being incorporated into the same system. In this context, it will be found that as we attempt to fit the various bi-polar pieces into the picture, there is a wrong way and a right way round for each element – only one way of producing a result which makes sense.

The argument is purely logical. If we ask, for example, whether the cooking-process took place when women were menstruating or when they were fertile, there can be no doubt as to the answer. Cooking would have been pointless if there were no meat to cook. The cooking- process had to begin, then, no earlier than at the conclusion of the
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sex-strike, when the hunters would have been expected to return home with their kills. By this time, the women’s menstrual periods would have been over and the fertile period would have been beginning or about to begin. We have already determined that this would have been the normative time for marital sex. This gives us a preliminary result: meat-eating and sex would have been concurrent activities. Following each sex-strike, we can picture a period of celebration in which, day after day, women and men feasted on cooked meat, formed into couples and enjoyed one another’s bodies.

The same kind of reasoning will fill in the remaining essential details of the model (Figs. 1, 2). If hunting takes place while the moon is waxing and sex is to take place immediately following the hunt, the phase of feasting/celebration must begin at the full moon. Logically, the moment of full moon would have to be a paradox or point of transition, marking (a) the climax of the hunt (the hunt’s consummation bringing it to an end) and (b) the point at which cooking, sex and feasting all begin. If ovulation occurs around this time (which it must do if sex is to be fertile), then menstruation, by contrast, must occur at the opposite point in the lunar month – coinciding with the moon’s absence from the sky. Dark moon, then, must mark the onset of the sex-strike. If the full moon – with the success of the hunt – brings this strike to a conclusion, we are left with two weeks in which to be on strike (while the men are preparing for and engaging in the hunt) and two weeks in which to relax and enjoy the results. Full moon marks the transition from sex-strike to the consumption-phase. Dark moon marks the reverse transition back into the sex-strike phase.

We are left, then, with a picture of two social “worlds” corresponding to two kinds of time – that of the waxing moon on the one hand, waning moon on the other. In one temporal sector, blood-relations dominate, marital relations are excluded, meat is raw and meat-hunger prevails; in the other, cooking-fires are lit, marital relations predominate and there is feasting on cooked meat. In the first phase, men are essentially “maternal uncles”, “sons” and “brothers” to their kin, while women are “mothers”, “sisters” and “daughters”; with the transition to the second phase, everyone exchanges partners and roles – to become spouses or lovers to polar-opposite kinds of relatives.

Ritual

This gives us the point of departure for the world’s most recurrent ritual and mythological traditions. In folklore the world over, the moments for “magical” transformation are, above all, those of dark and full moon. It is at such times that men reveal themselves as werewolves, witches cast their terrible spells or toads turn into princes.

The menstrual sex strike which forms the model’s point of departure is “ritual power” in its initial, simple form. Admittedly, going on strike in the circumstances defined by the model may not necessarily appear to be a “ceremony”, nor the casting of a magical “spell”, nor the performance of a “religious” act. But already it displays the defining characteristics of ritual action in human culture.

The process is linked with the moon. We may imagine the participants engaging in dancing, singing or other collective activities at full and dark moon, emotional harmony assisting in the achievement of physiological harmony and hence menstrual synchrony. In going on lunar-scheduled menstrual sex strike, each woman brings her body into tune with an internal clock which may seem to derive from the sky itself, and which is in any event beyond arbitrary manipulation or conscious direction by individuals. The blood-flow has its own periodicity, independent of human will, and it is this seemingly- transcendental force which regularly binds the participants to each other, setting them apart in a distinct sphere.

The strike is coercive. Its necessary tendency is to negate the sexual-political dominance of men. To the extent that its logic prevails, women present a common front, lining up as one body. Each man respects the boundary they present; none will sexually invade the feminine sphere. Yet the power of the strike transcends the need for violence. Its sanction is the threat of exclusion. The uncooperative male risks excommunication not only from female company but from the human community as such. This is a forceful sanction, with ultimate death very much implied. Yet the threat works autonomously. A man who has violated a woman becomes stained with her blood; his action therefore publicly marks him out. As he anticipates the consequences, fear works its own – perhaps lethal – effects. To its would-be violators, therefore, menstrual blood seems poisonous in a quite literal way.

Ritual power among hunter-gatherers and others in the ethnographic record has the following general characteristics:

1. It sustains its momentum primarily through participatory. rhythmic, synchronised activities such as dancing and singing;
2. It involves the synchronisation of the activities of humans with those of the heavenly bodies;
3. It appeals to forms of authority which transcend the powers of human individuals;
4. It frequently demands the observance of sexual and dietary taboos, insisting on the inviolability of persons or things “set apart”;
5. Where sanctions are concerned, these are primarily non-violent and operate directly through the emotions. People respect ritual power for fear of offending “the spirits” and thereby incurring illness or bad luck.

To the extent that women in traditional cultures are said to possess ritual power, men usually depict this negatively. Virtually throughout the world, the strongest and most negative form of feminine ritual power is the potency of menstrual blood, male contact with which is thought to produce illness or bad luck. There are often comparable or associated attitudes towards blood in meat.

Despite these negative attitudes, in cultures in which men claim a monopoly over ritual power, they frequently assert such power by bleeding. Under such circumstances, the blood is thought of as life-giving and positive. Synchronised male “childbirth” and “menstruation” are in fact recurrent features of secret male initiation rites (see below), whose associated myths insist that men’s power once had to be “stolen” from women.

If ritual power the world over stemmed from a tradition in which women went periodically on lunar-scheduled menstrual sex-strike, these are precisely the features we would expect to find.

Concepts of divinity

The strike transcends the identity of physical individuals. Its participants may not yet be priestesses, but each is certainly the representative of an overriding social power. If the sex strike can extend indefinitely – if in principle it is as omnipresent as is menstrual synchrony or the moon’s light – then in embodying this power, each woman stands for something transcendental. She stands for her sisters, who may be potentially limitless in number. And if men respect this power, then although they need acknowledge no divinity, there is present here at least something of the formal structure of religious deference to “higher beings”.

Let us re-examine the characteristics of these women. What powers do they really possess? And in what respects do these powers resemble or differ from those which, in more developed, complex social systems, will become thought of as those of “the gods”?

These women cannot magically strike men dead – but they can certainly exclude them from sex. To that extent, men can be rendered impotent at a stroke. No prayers are offered to these women, but men do strive to please and to be included when the time for love-making arrives. No-one offers them bloody animal sacrifices – but men do hunt and bring back game. No-one regards these women as living in the sky or in the underworld – but, when menstruating, they are certainly in a world “set apart”. No-one conceptualises them as half-animal and half-human – as “totemic” mother-figures or as “mistresses of the game animals”. But their menstrual blood is certainly identified with the blood of the hunt, both kinds of blood being saturated with taboo or power. Failure to respect this blood leads to failure in the hunt. These women are not immortal – they do not die and then resurrect themselves, nor undergo reincarnation, nor flit between heaven and earth, but their strike is periodically renewed, as is their life-blood which flows from generation to generation. Moreover, in menstruation they do seem to accompany the moon to its own temporary death, moving into another realm from which they later return. Admittedly, these women are ordinary human beings. They are subject to gravity and to the other ordinary laws of physics. They cannot levitate, nor fly magically through the night, nor be in two places at once, nor have eyes which pry into all corners simultaneously. Yet during each menstrual ritual these women’s potency is indeed that of their strike – which, like any strike, does make its presence felt everywhere at once, transcending space, as if possessed of a thousand ears and eyes.

There is much, then, that is “goddess-like” about the menstrual sex- strike. Admittedly, to use such language is to apply a later cultural category – that of developed religious ideology – to a situation in which it is not yet applicable. It can be conceded that to begin with, there are no shamans, no priestesses, no temples. The social world is not divided into mortals and immortals, nor are humans divided into lay people and those who are “set apart”. Unlike in developed religions, there are no specialists in the sacred life: all humans are involved in the solidarity of the sacred community during one phase of the lunar cycle, and then released from it in the next. All take turns in being “set apart” and reunited, in “the other world” and in this. If there are priests and priestesses, everyone is such – at least for a part of each month. If there are goddesses and gods, everyone can at the appropriate time participate in their identity and power – which is no more than the ordinary cultural strength and solidarity of human beings themselves. Each of these points of contrast is significant, and each underlines why it would be confusing to speak of “religion” as present already within the specifications of the model. But it would be an over-simplification to state simply that my model has no room for religion – that humans acknowledge no transcendental power. What we can say is that men (and, in a different way, women) respect no power other than the moon-linked, blood-washed, periodically-asserted sanctity and inviolability of menstruating women linked in solidarity with one another and with their offspring. This gives us a springboard from which the world’s religious and magical traditions can be derived.

The Ice Age and beyond

Towards the end of the last Ice Age, all over the world, a gradual deterioration in hunting-conditions made it increasingly difficult for the trail-blazing cultures of humanity to synchronise with the moon.

At the human revolution’s high-point, hunters would have tended to select the larger game animals – those requiring the greatest collective endeavours to hunt, and providing the greatest rewards once taken. In addition to reindeer, elk, bison or other herding species – which may have been driven into traps and slaughtered in large numbers at a time – we can imagine a single slain mammoth feeding a sizeable community for weeks. It is not difficult to reconcile infrequent, not-more-than-once-per-month hunting with a reliance on large catches or on single kills of very large animals, particularly if the meat could be frozen or preserved by other means. But large animals, besides making the most broad and visible targets, would have been the slowest to reproduce. To have killed an adult female mammoth may have threatened the survival-prospects of a whole herd. It is quite different with small, rapidly-reproducing species such as rabbits: these can be culled without noticeable effect on the rate of reproduction of local populations.

To the extent that late Ice Age peoples focused upon large game, then, it seems probable that human hunting would have become a factor in driving some of these species towards extinction. This, in any event, is a widely-supported interpretation – known as the “overkill” hypothesis – which has been put forward to explain the phenomenon of “Pleistocene extinctions”. This expression refers to the fact that towards the end of the last Ice Age, nearly simultaneously in all continents, a wave of extinctions took place affecting in particular the largest species of game animals and certain animal predators. Woolly mammoths, giant camels in North America, diprotodons in Australia – these and other huge creatures were either hunted to extinction or for other reasons proved unable to survive. In parallel with this, herds of smaller game began to shrink whilst in many regions, with the warmer climate, the great expanses of open tundra over which human hunters had previously roamed became covered with dense forest. The “golden age” for the world’s great hunter-cultures was over.

As large game became scarce, human populations would have had to adapt by broadening their subsistence-base. It would have been necessary more and more to supplement the diet with both smaller game and vegetable food – to revert, in other words (except in regions where agriculture later evolved), to something in many ways closer to the resource-base of omnivorous higher primates and ancestral hominid forms.

As small game became relied upon, hunting-technology and its associated social forms would have had to change. A single kill would no longer have sufficed to feed a community for days. Game may have been more dispersed, and finding it more difficult. If the most a hunting-excursion could normally produce were one or two small animals, it may no longer have seemed efficient to form into large hunting bands. It may have made better sense for communities to disperse thinly over the landscape, forming into small family-type groups or bands, each continuously gathering and hunting as opportunities presented themselves – much as most hunter-gatherer peoples do today.

Rather than remain for a season at a fixed home base while the menfolk departed periodically for the hunt, under the new conditions it may often have made better sense for each woman to keep up with “her” man, moving with a few children or other relatives, roaming almost continuously as her husband searched for game. In time, increasingly advanced kinds of weapons – leading eventually to the most elaborate of barbed spears, the bow-and-arrow, blow-pipes and poisoned darts – may have made it possible for single male hunters to make their kills without the need for large-scale co-operative endeavours.

Such changes would have had profound social effects. But the relevant populations would not easily have relinquished their traditions. If there is one thing which characterises traditional human culture, it is surely its conservatism. Even when changes of substance are made, people tend to do all possible to ensure that at least the forms of the old ways of life are preserved. In this context, we may imagine the ancient hunting traditions being kept alive in one form or another wherever possible. Should there have been just one season or month during each year when a moon-scheduled collective hunt could be arranged, people would have gathered from far and wide to be able to participate.

It seems that the forms of ritual action which are familiar in the ethnographic record emerged through a process of some such kind. We can view most rituals as functional in contemporary contexts, yet ancient in their logic. Ultimately, they are explicable as attempts to hold up and validate culture’s most elementary and basic ideals even when daily life can no longer be modelled on them.

An annual collective hunt, linked to women’s sexual cycle and to the moon, used primarily as a means of establishing a principle rather than as a means of obtaining food – would be a ritual. Millennia after it had first begun to be practised, social anthropologists might describe such a recurrent event as a “rite of sacrifice”, a “fertility rite” or an “increase rite” – depending on which particular aspect of the re-enacted cosmically-synchronised hunt seemed to the interpreter most significant. In an earthly drama harnessed to events in the skies, blood would alternate with fire, fasting would be followed by feasting, sexual abstinence by an “orgiastic” celebration. For the participants, the whole point would be to ensure general well-being by preserving concordance and harmony, making sure that the blood flowed at the proper cosmological moments, that society’s power to enforce sexual and dietary taboos was safeguarded – and that the almost-forgotten logic of the old life-style was preserved and handed down even despite its near-impracticability in materialistic terms.

Eventually, a time would come when the whole ritual would have become so disembodied, so divorced from obvious economic necessity, and so fragmentary in its implementation as to need laborious explanation in order to justify its being re-enacted at all. Why was it necessary to watch the skies and, at the correct moment, to take an animal, to cut its throat and to offer the blood which poured out to the spirits? What had this to do with pleasing the ancestors, with preserving women’s fertility, with rain-making or with the prevention of drought or famine? As questions of this kind were asked, explanatory stories would have been elaborated. The tribal elders would have explained that the secrets lay hidden in the distant past, in the instructions handed down from the heroic “dreamtime” or magical epoch when the world was still being formed, when people could travel to and fro between “this world” and “the world beyond” and when gods and humans conversed on easy terms.

The disharmony of the spheres

According to the hypothesis, women’s synchronisation of their menstrual cycles was not achievable by mere act of will. It had evolved as a necessary component within a total system. The periodicities of the moon, of cooking-fire, of sex and of feasting – all were involved in the synchrony, whose techno-economic basis and ultimate precondition was the lunar periodicity of the hunt. Only within this framework could women’s solidarity be repeatedly validated and sustained by the internal social forces against which It was counterposed – sustained, above all, by the need to harness the endeavours of men as hunters. As the game herds diminished, as female-inspired collective hunting increasingly proved unreliable, and as it became more and more advisable instead for people to disperse, women’s solidarity would have begun to break down. As meat became scarce, the idea of waiting for the correct lunar moment before catching a small animal would have seemed inappropriate. When game came close to the camp, everyone would have wanted to chase it, no matter what the moon was doing. But if a creature were caught, then the idea that cooking had to be a full moon ritual would likewise have begun to seem impracticable. People would have wanted to cook when there was meat to be cooked – not just when the shamans declared the moment to be cosmologicaily auspicious.

Diminishing supplies of game would have led to the need for men in their hunting-expeditions to be less limited in the types of game selected. In less favoured regions, anything – rabbits, lizards, rats – might have had to be considered. Whereas killing a mammoth or slaughtering several reindeer would have concentrated numbers of hunters and consumers, generating intensive co-operation and sharing, this may not have been true for the new kind of hunting. The prospects of finding only small game may have been insufficient to motivate women’s efforts in organising prolonged sex-strikes, or in inducing men to depart on lengthy expeditions involving overnight stays. It may have made better sense in any case for the whole community to break into small groups, each camping, moving and foraging continuously wherever the opportunities were best. As one thing led to another, neither the moon nor women’s menstrual cycles could have seemed significant in the way they were before. They would no longer have seemed capable of governing society’s rhythm of work alternating with rest. Faced with the choice between moon and meat – between ritual ideal and survival – people would have chosen to survive.

The rule of men

As women’s economic value as gatherers increased, so their power would have declined. There is nothing in history to indicate that those whose labour sustains society are automatically those who rule: on the contrary, all the evidence is that the “ruling classes” are those who can compel others to labour for them. Women were powerful when they could compel men to hunt for them, when this compulsion was successful economically, and when the associated organising work brought women joyfully together as sisters. They lost power as this moon-scheduled mode of production gave way to another which required women’s dispersal, turned women into an exploited labour-force, and prioritised marital relations at the expense of sisterhood or “blood”.

In asking why and how women lost their former “magical” power, it should be recalled that the model specifies two phases between which society alternated. We may then note that the second phase – the “waning moon” phase of consumption and sexual enjoyment – contains within it already the seeds of what will later become the “the individual family”. According to the model, at full moon – the point in each cycle when the cooking fires were lit and blood-pollution was dispelled – women no longer prioritised their solidarity. They ceased to be “powerful” on account of their blood. They became available – free to meet their male sexual partners as individuals. Full moon, then, in a sense already signified transference of the bride from her own kin to her affines’ side.

With the decline in the importance of moon-scheduled hunting and therefore of women’s monthly sex-strike, this “waning moon” phase – the phase during which the powers of “the blood” were in temporary suspension – began to extend throughout the cycle as a whole. Or to put this another way: with the increasing importance of continuous, every-day-of-the-month food-foraging, and with men’s increasing reliance on the gathered produce of the opposite sex, men were increasingly tempted to retain their sexual partners as helpers throughout the month, whilst women – lacking their own former strength in solidarity – felt a new level of dependency on the marital tie.

Marriage became not a renewable monthly “honeymoon” but a permanent bond. Instead of relinquishing their wives during each dark moon, men held on to them, menstruation or no. Despite all tradition, they could do this because economically it made more sense. And as men began to live off the food-gathering labour of their wives, hunting only sporadically and providing an unreliable supply of meat, each man with his wife or wives, together with dependent relatives, began turning into the main productive unit.

Once this shift in emphasis had occurred, the basic conquests of women’s revolution were under threat. The various woman-centred social mechanisms which had humanised society lost their former effect. Once a woman had been taken as a permanent wife, her sexual “yes” was assumed to be in principle continuous. A man expected sex, now, not because he brought meat but because he had a wife. It was a matter of his “rights” as a husband. Since (given women’s atomisation a collective sex-strike was no longer something to worry about, men could increasingly take their wives for granted. The pressures on them to “behave” were therefore correspondingly weakened. And women, by the same token, were increasingly tempted to use sex in competing with one another in the struggle to gain favours from men.

Menstrual synchrony was not sustainable because each woman, sexually isolated in a partnership with her husband, could no longer keep in close physical contact with her sisters. To the extent that – out of deference to tradition – men still respected women’s menstrual condition in any sense, this “respect” took a changed form. Men, now, simply kept out of the way when their wives were menstruating. Or, as their power increased, they forced their wives to keep out of the way, valuing them only when they were available – and at other times marginalising them in special huts or on the outskirts of the camp. Menstrual “taboos”, in other words, now assumed politically-inverted, woman-oppressing forms.

In many ways, all this was a return to the pre-human, pre-cultural state. But it was not a simple return. An evolutionary regression to the animal stage was now no longer an option for humans. Culture had made us dependent on one another in zoologically unprecedented ways, and there was no going back. Without rules of sexual morality, and without language, tradition and technology, the defenceless human animal in most environments could not have survived. But conquests such as the rule against incest were still intimately bound up with the language of blood and with the ancient symbolic system of which this was a part. They could not be retained without retaining much of their original framework and context. And so a “compromise” solution had to be arrived at – a compromise which still defines our condition today. We retained as much of the cultural heritage as was possible, preserving the abstract forms of the ancient life-ways even whilst their real contents were largely lost, adjusting always between two opposite constraints – the need to innovate in the food-search on the one hand, and the need to preserve tradition on the other. Out of this clash of necessities, the world as we know it was born.

Note.

This article is based on a lecture given to the Traditional Cosmology Society and Scottish Royal Anthropological Institute in Edinburgh University in February 1987. Whilst retaining responsibility for any possible errors, I thank those present – including in particular Emily Lyle, Alan Barnard, Kenneth Maddock and Roy Willis – for their helpful comments and criticism.

References are omitted, but the following works indicate something of the range of findings which the argument is designed to link and to explain:

Leroi-Gourhan, A.
1968 The art of prehistoric man in western Europe. London: Thames & Hudson.
[In the symbolism of European Ice Age cave art, penis is to vagina as spear is to wound. The symbol for “vulva” may equally be used to indicate “wound” in a game animal. The focus of ritual attention is particularly on the female reproductive organs and the colour red].

Lévi-Strauss, C.
1970-81 Introduction to a science of mythology. Vols. 1-4. London: Cape.
[The myths of the Americas – and by implication of humanity – are reducible to a single supermyth. In this, sexual oppression is justified on the grounds that women are periodic creatures, unable to synchronise their menstrual cycles and so liable to throw the moon, sun and cosmos into chaos).

McClintock M.
1971 Menstrual synchrony and suppression. Nature: 229: 244-5.
[Women who associate closely with one another tend to synchronise their menstrual cycles].

Marshack, A.
1972 The roots of civilization. The cognitive beginnings of man’s first art, symbol and notation. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
[The earliest notation-systems of Ice Age hunters were lunar calendars].

Testart, A.
1985 Le communisme primitif Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
[The most archaic hunter-gatherer symbolic traditions centre around an “ideology of blood”. Its function is to polarise society into segregated male and female camps. The ideology consists of a series of positive and negative relationships drawn between women’s menstrual blood and the blood of game animals].

Turke, P. W.
1984 Effects of Ovulatory Concealment and Synchrony on Protohominid Mating Systems and Parental Roles. Ethology and Sociobiology, 5: 3 3-44.
[In the course of human evolution, female protohominids forced males to provide consistent parenting by concealing ovulation, synchronising their menstrual cycles and extending sexual receptivity].

For a fuller elaboration of the argument and for further references, see:

Knight, C.

1983 Levi-Strauss and the Dragon: Mythologiques reconsidered in the light of an Australian Aboriginal Myth” (Man, N.S., 18, 2 1-50).

1987 Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, Ph.D. thesis, University of London.

1988 “Menstruation and the Australian Rainbow Snake”, in: T. Buckley and A. Gottlieb (eds.), Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1990 The Origins of Society. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

C. K., August 1989

ABSTRACT

Protohominid females became women by relating to males in a completely new way. As the males of our species began hunting to obtain meat food, an initial problem for females was to obtain an adequate share of such meat. There was little in the genetic make- up of males to make them bring back their game instead of eating it themselves in the bush. Although there was nothing to stop females from hunting for themselves, responsibilities for offspring tended to immobilise them, rendering them less free to hunt than were their sexual partners.

Human females solved the problem by refusing sex to all males except those who came home to them with their kills. This strategy required and generated inter-female solidarity. When a female was refusing sex to a “lazy” male partner and was determined to make him hunt, she had to prevent him from finding sex elsewhere. She had to organise other females to join her in refusing sex, keeping up the boycott of this male unless or until he went off and brought back some meat.

Such solidarity brought females into intimate contact with one another – contact close enough to bring their menstrual cycles into synchrony. In each female group, in other words, those who were not pregnant, lactating or menopausal would have menstruated simultaneously. These women “implicated” all the other women in this, so that the whole group – including pregnant and lactating females – were in effect “menstruating” together.

The importance of this was that bleeding had to be used as the basic means of signalling “No sex” to males. During each collective menstrual period, women had to assert themselves as “on strike” They had to signal “No” not just individually but as a gender-group. It was important that no woman should be allowed to undercut her sisters by appearing to be sexually available at such a time, even if she were not able to menstruate in a literal sense herself Women measured up to this challenge by transcending biology. On the one hand they dampened down and eventually eliminated oestrus-signalling; on the other, they proved able to “borrow” the symbolic effects of one another’s menstrual blood, on occasion actually painting one another in shared blood where biology failed to provide what was required.

Women, then, went periodically “on strike”. By this means, each month, they motivated their menfolk to organise an extended large-scale hunting-expedition. By establishing that menstrual bleeding indicated “No” or “taboo”, moreover, the females made possible a further step. The game animals which men hunted also bled. To the extent that an analogy between women’s and animal blood could be established – assuming, in other words, that blood as such could be treated as “taboo” – this meant that men could not eat the meat. They were prevented by the menstrual taboo from being “selfish” with the game animals which they killed.

Women would have been the earliest custodians of cooking-fire. The taboo on bloody meat would have compelled men to bring their game home for women to cook as the condition of rendering it edible. A man who wished to eat his own kill out in the bush would have had to violate the blood-taboo, eating his meat “menstrually” polluted – i.e. raw.

Further, it would have made sense for collective hunting expeditions to have been held at the time of each month when the light of the moon made overnight travel possible. This would have facilitated the emergence of a total system in which hunting, menstruation and the moon were brought into synchrony – a system in which the hunt as a periodic work/rest activity was governed by a lunar/menstrual clock.

Published by the Radical Anthropology Group, London, 1989

Abstract

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.

In this context, a model of the “initial situation” for human culture is proposed. In this, menstrual bleeding is (a) socially synchronised and (b) marks a periodic feminine sexual withdrawal (in effect, a “sex-strike”) functioning to motivate and regularize male periodic hunting. On a symbolic level, menstrual blood is identified with the blood of game animals, a generalised avoidance of blood ensuring both a periodic separation of sexual partners (necessary for effective hunting) and the separation of hunters as consumers from their own kills (necessary to ensure economic circulation and exchange of the produce).

The body of the thesis takes the form of an extensive testing of this model. It is shown that it facilitates a much-simplified and internally coherent re-reading of Lévi-Strauss Mythologiques, in addition to much other recent writing on traditional mythology, cosmology, ritual and symbolism.

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A review of Chris Knight’s Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture. 2000

Timothy Mason (Universite de Paris 8) 2000.

The first academic anthropologists were much influenced by Darwin. The ways in which Tylor or Frazer applied the selectionist theory of evolution have often been summarily characterized as an Imperialistic and ethnocentric form of Social Darwinism, but in fact their thinking was more interesting and more complex than that. Nevertheless, when a new generation of anthropologists, closer to the terrain, less interested in historical questions, took over the baton, they renounced the search for the Key to All Mysteries, leaving Frazer to the poets and novelists. For Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, the Savage ceases to be the witness to our prehistoric past, and becomes a man like others, his daily cares and fundamental needs being much like our own.

The anthropological community congratulated itself on having turned its back on Big Questions without answers. New, more properly scientific problems could now be tackled with new, more properly scientific methods. But, perhaps unfortunately, it may be that the social sciences are open to other pressures, other criteria, than are the hard sciences. Malinowski owed his success with the public to the tales and anecdotes that run through his work ; his theoretical contributions have never fully satisfied the specialists. However, in general, after the anthropologists abandoned their early attempts to outline a history of humankind, they found little favour with the ordinary reader. If some of their works still attracted attention, these were more likely to be moral tales of the kind that Colin Turnbull offered in his books on the M’Buti, whom he found in a state of grace, or on the Ik whom he saw as prefiguring our own terrifying future. As Chris Knight remarks, by renouncing the quest for origins, the anthropological community lost its readers and cut itself off from contact with the world at large.

The vacuum, argues Knight, was quickly to be filled by sociobiology, first launched by Edward O. Wilson, but then taken up, above all, by the primatologists working in the wake of De Vore and Goodall. The chimpanzees of Gombe or the baboons of ‘The Pumphouse Gang’ filled our Sunday colour supplements. So powerful were the stories told, that sometimes it was as if human beings were nothing but apes with language added on ; culture came to seem nothing more than a kind of varnish behind which one might espy the naked ape, armed with reproductive strategies and engaging in power struggles which were the very image of those of our primate cousins.

A fully evolutionist theory of culture had to await the publication of Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The Selfish Gene’. At the centre of this theory is the ‘meme’, which plays the same role of ‘replicator’ as the gene fills in biological evolution. And just as in the biological world, memes must obey combinatory rules. Thus our history can be characterized as a struggle between memes for their survival, and the elaboration of structures which are more and more complex, but which follow a few basic principles. This thesis is more seductive for the humanist than are the constructs of the sociobiologists, for it points to a radical cut-off between biology and culture. Memes are the new replicators, the wave of the future, which means that humanity is to be at the centre of the new programme. Furthermore, the literary critic will recognize a familiar air, for ‘memology’ offers echoes of the work the Russian formalists, of Vladimir Propp’s analyses of folk-tales, or of Levi-Strauss’s work on mythologies.

Blood Relations; a Marxist sociobiology

It is in this context that Chris Knight’s book may be read. Knight is a theoretician rather than an ethnologist, and his writings are based on the observations made by others; the shadows of Frazer, Freud and Levi-Strauss lie across his pages. A militant socialist in the tradition of Engels, he sees his work as a left-wing response to sociobiology, which he characterizes as the Political Economy of our time. It is, he believes, up to Marxists to use and transform it. But he is a resolutely post-modern Marxist; one of the names he invokes – along with that of Mary Douglas – is Donna Haraway, for he has drawn much of his inspiration from her ‘Primate Visions’. Knight tells us that he will add his own story to the others, that it will be a resolutely political story, with no pretensions to objectivity.

The tale that he unfolds is, predictably, one of revolution – the fundamental revolution, centred on reproduction and sexuality. It is not, he assures us, true to say that human nature is such that revolution is impossible to accomplish – on the contrary, our humanity, our cultures, our relational networks come into being through and in a revolution initiated by women 100,000 years ago, and through the counter-revolution subsequently mounted by men. Thus it was that our humanity was forged by women, whose fundamental needs for food and for help in raising children form the foundations upon which culture was to be erected.

Let us follow one of his key illustrations: the Sharanahua is a South American people among whom one may regularly see a group of young women, arrayed in their finest garments and very visibly painted, form a line, dance together, and challenge the young men. Each of the women chooses a man whom she orders to go off into the forest and hunt for her. Off go the men; when they return, the women are waiting for them. Unhappy is the wretch who comes back empty-handed; he will do his best to creep into the village unperceived, and to hide in his hut. The lucky hunter, however, lays his prey down at the entry to the village, where the women are waiting, and goes off to prepare himself for the festivities. He knows that he will that very night enjoy the favours of the woman by whom he was chosen.

Knight tells us that this scenario is a distant echo of the birth of all human culture. Women need men – not as mere genitors, but as providers of goods and services. To persuade males to play a role so rare among primates, women have recourse to a ‘sex-strike’. Knight sums this up in the formula: No meat, no sex. To underpin his theory, he follows two paths; first he carries out a rewrite of Levi-Strauss, and second he tries to show how the very specific physiology of the human female can be explained by the ‘sex-strike’. To this anthropological theory, Knight adds in counter-point an account of his own development. Throughout his book, he reveals how his own intellectual and political evolution influenced his scientific choices. The chapters of his book do not simply follow an argumentative chain, tracing out the logical steps in the construction of his theory; they also trace out the pathways which lead from the youthful naivete of the early militant to the mature adult capable of making an honourable contribution to the revolutionary project.

Incest and ‘own-kill’

Levi-Strauss places the birth of culture under the sign of the incest-taboo. But, argues Knight, that does not go far enough; women are not just pawns in a game played out between groups of brothers. On the contrary, they are themselves the main players. The incest taboo cannot be understood unless it is placed in the context of a second taboo, the traces of which, he says, are to be found in virtually all hunter-gatherer societies: a hunter is forbidden to consume the meat of an animal that he has killed himself. This is what Knight calls ‘the own-kill rule’. In most cases, the hunter must offer the meat to one or another of his in-laws. Often enough, he must provide his wife’s family with meat and other services for years before he is admitted as a son-in-law. To taste the blood of an animal that one has brought down oneself is the equivalent of an incest – you should not sully your own blood. Knight writes:

“If one’s ‘taboo’ or ‘totem’ is not one’s ‘meat’ or ‘blood’ or ‘flesh’ in the most literal sense, it is at least one’s ‘spirit’, ‘substance’ or ‘essence’. And the crucial point is that the ‘self’, however conceived, is not to be appropriated by the self. It is for others to enjoy. According to this logic, a man’s sisters are inseparable from himself, and , sexually, they are therefore for others to take as sexual partners. A man’s hunting products – the game animals which he kills – are likewise inseparable from himself, and are his own flesh, his own blood, or his own essence which he is not allowed to eat. Not two rules are in force, but only one; the rule against ‘eating one’s own flesh’.”

Upon this basis is erected a cycle which lasts one lunar cycle. During the period of the new moon, women remain among their families of origin – the group of sisters, of mothers and of children, often living together under the same roof. The men, for their part, go out to hunt. During the period of the full moon, the women join their husbands or their lovers – if they have succeeded in bringing meat back to the village. The men, as we can see, sexually consume blood which is not their own. And the women, their sisters, their mothers, their children and their brothers, eating the meat which has been brought by their lovers, also consume blood which is not their own.

It has to be said that in his critique and extension of Levi-Strauss, Knight offers arguments which are pertinent and interesting, and that the quasi-symmetrical structure which he establishes from the different forms of taboo is pretty convincing. But Knight wants to go further than this; like Freud, whom he invokes, he is in the business of digging up a primary scene – the sex-strike. In the natural world, as we may learn from the writings of the primatologists, society is pretty much a collection of individuals, each of which has its own personal interests. Whether eating or reproducing, in the end, each individual is in it for him or herself. Some kind of rudimentary alliance can arise, but there is no true exchange – monkeys do not exchange food, do not exchange sexual partners, unless they are threatened by a stronger individual. Human beings, as Levi-Strauss understood, can do this.

The question that must be asked, claims Knight, is how women managed to escape from the control of the dominant males, and how they managed to persuade the other males to work for them, to free them from the need to spend all their time looking for food to the detriment of their maternal roles. This is indeed a critical question, for human babies are even more fragile than are monkey infants, of which many die while very small due to accidents occasioned by the mother’s need to be mobile in order to feed herself. Human females, then, have a strong interest in establishing a home base or semi-permanent camp, and in getting men to do the work of provisioning.

This brings us to a crucial point in the argument; Knight illustrates it by reference to another, altogether different species. Among sea-horses, monogamy is the rule. The females impose this form of sexual relationship through the synchronization of their ovulation – all the females produce their eggs at exactly the same time and so the males cannot easily fertilize a number of females. Female sea-horses use the moon as a cosmic clock. Human females, suggests Knight, did the same thing.

A group of women began to ovulate in synchrony, producing their eggs at the time of the full moon. Their menstruation, obviously, was also collective, and coincided with the new moon. The women’s sex-strike occurs, then, at the moment of the new moon, and is realized through collective menstruation. Let us see how the strike could have been put in place.

Women, periods and the moon

Human sexuality is rather different from that of our closest relatives, in particular as it concerns the females of the species, for whom the most marked characteristics are the absence of estrus and permanent receptivity. Although there are primate species with similar characteristics – particularly those which are monogamous – it is not usual and never as strongly pronounced. One explanation, put forward by Desmond Morris, among others, is that the female attempts to capture her mate’s long-term attention through offering a greater intensity and continuity of sexual pleasure. It has also been pointed out that the absence of estrus means that if a man wants to be sure of impregnating his partner, he must maintain sexual relations with her over a longer period than is the case among chimpanzees.

Knight remains unconvinced by all this. What is marked among the females of our species, he argues, is not her constant receptivity, but rather the moment when she is less receptive – her menstrual period. He writes:

“Despite oestrus loss, hormonally controlled sexual signals are not entirely missing from the human female menstrual cycle. On the contrary, menstruation in the human case has been accentuated as an external display. It is at menstruation rather than ovulation that the human female experiences her behaviour as hormonally influenced to a certain degree.”

And he adds :

“A woman loses considerably more blood during menstruation than does any other primate. This shedding of blood, although small, represents a significant loss – a loss which has to be made good by additional food intake, particularly of iron. The adaptive advantage of this has not yet been explained”.

Menstruation, he suggests, functions as a signal. It lets men know that the woman will refuse sexual intimacy. But this is not enough ; all fecundable women must signal their refusal at the same time. Knight needs to demonstrate that this is possible. He begins by noting that although the menstrual cycle is not necessarily linked to the phases of the moon – periodicity among primates is variable – the typical cycle of the human female lasts 28.5 days, and coincides exactly with the lunar cycle. Next, Knight cites the results of some research that indicates that when women spend enough time together – in a boarding school, for example, or a university dormitory – they tend to have their periods at the same time.

Women, then, are capable of menstrual solidarity, and of clearly demonstrating, all together, that they are not disposed to have sexual relations. They use the moon and the tides to synchronize ; at the new moon, women have their periods. They remain shut away in their homes. They mock the men, as Sharanahua women still do today : “There’s no meat in the house”, they say, “we’ll eat penises”. The men, thus reminded of their human duties – duties of exchange and reciprocity – get together to organize the hunt. They will return, says Knight, around the full moon, loaded with meat.

Women, men and culture

At first, the occasional sex-strike did not bring about a radical break between nature and culture. This only came about when our ancestors were forced to quit the coastal regions under the pressure of the new meteorological conditions brought about by the last Ice-Age. Knight situates the break very late, putting it at only 70,000 years ago. It was at this period that, deprived of the resources of the sea such as fish, crustaceans and baby seals, women began to feel the need to force men to go hunting regularly.

This required an elaborate social organization; one the one side, the women, who had to plan and put into effect the strike, and on the other the men, who had to plan and carry out the collective hunt. For the women, menstrual blood linked to menstrual synchronization was the basis of their solidarity. But at any one time, only a minority of women would be having regular periods: pregnant women, those with unweaned children, older women and the undernourished do not bleed. Even today, among hunter-gatherers, menstruation is rare, and very few women have the regular cycles that their counterparts in industrial societies undergo – indeed, anthropologists refer to this rarity of periods when they try to explain why such peoples hold menstrual blood in abhorrence. So there is not enough real blood to do the trick – particularly if the hunt lasts for several days, and the men who have remained at the home base must be kept at bay. Knight at this point in his argument brings in the fact that a good number of archeological sites show quite abundant traces of red ochre :

“… it is reasonable to suppose that on many occasions, humans would have experienced the need to make visible the source of the ‘magic’. The strike itself may have seemed in this context somewhat demanding of blood. If my hypothesis were correct, we might expect to find cultures to have evolved artifices serving to amplify the visual impact of women’s blood. Real menstrual blood dries, flakes and turns almost black rather than red within a few hours. If women wanted to declare themselves defiantly ‘powerful’ for longer and longer periods, and wanted to express this in some visually unmistakable way, they may well have felt the need to augment their blood with something which stayed red for longer and did not quickly flake. Could red juices, ochre, or mixtures of ochre with blood and/or animal fat, have fulfilled such a function?”

Understandably, Knight replies to his own question in the affirmative. Symbolic culture, according to this hypothesis, comes to light in the body-decoration of women. The first human message is that addressed to the male group by the female group who, covered in red, the emblem of their menstrual blood, say a collective ‘No’, and offer the first exchange. Sex, says Knight, for meat.

This is the source of two fundamental taboos: the women remain in the base camp, and with them are the children and the young males who are too young to hunt, old people, and a few males who are left behind to protect the group. The men who go on the hunt must be sure that the women will not lie with the men who stay behind: sons and nephews become taboo. At the same time, the men must promise not to keep the meat for themselves, and in this way, the own-kill taboo is put in place.

What kind of feminism?

Knight sees his work as contributing to those currents in anthropology and sociobiology which take account of the feminist perspective – but not just any feminist perspective:

“Influenced by friends and comrades who were feminists, I naturally felt feminism of any variety to be a liberating political force. But … for the women I was closest to (many of whom were involved in the Greenham Common anti-Cruise missile campaigns of the early 1980s), the construction of ‘female males’ was not what the struggle was all about, any more than joining the capitalists was the essence of working-class emancipation. The struggle was more about refusing to collaborate with the whole masculinist political set-up, organising autonomously as women, drawing on support for real change from the wider class struggle – and fighting to bring men as allies into a world transformed on women’s terms.”

It may be – at least in part – for this reason that Knight takes such pains to reject the idea that the exchange offered by the women could be seen as a form of prostitution. He insists that among hunter-gatherers, it would be immoral in a woman to offer sex without demanding a gift in return, rather than in insisting on payment. In South America, in Melanesia, in Africa, the woman always expects the lover or husband to offer her gifts each time she makes love to him. The prostitute, says Knight, is not she who insists on the strict application of the basic rules imposed by the sex-strike. On the contrary, it is the strike-breaker, who offers her body to men on demand – by thus undermining feminine solidarity, she threatens society itself. Prostitution does not consist in the simple demand of a reward for sexual services, but in undercutting the trade-union price and offering up one’s body in the place of other women. The woman who openly demands a gift makes the rules clear; the prostitute muddies them.

How is it, then, that the prostitute is present in almost all human societies, and is so common in modern societies? According to Knight, she will only proliferate in societies which are dominated by men, in patriarchal societies. How is it, then, that if women gave birth to culture, women in all cultures find themselves under the masculine thumb?

Knight’s reply to this is that after the revolution, there was a counter-revolution. This counter-revolution is clearly recognized and celebrated by men. To demonstrate this, he takes the case of Australian Aboriginal peoples, among whom the myth of the Rainbow Snake is widely disseminated. This serpent, which swallows menstruating women, and which brings members of the same blood line together, where they should remain separate, is the very symbol of feminine solidarity, founded on the sex-strike and on synchronized menstruation, says Knight. But, in Aboriginal mythology, it can be seen that the men have hijacked the snake, putting themselves in the place of the women at the moment of collective menstruation. Women, they say, do not have ‘real periods’ – which is why they must be socially isolated when they bleed. Kept apart from one another while they menstruate, women are no longer able to synchronize, are not longer able to announce and celebrate the strike. Men, on the other hand, through sub-incision or other forms of self-mutilation, practiced collectively, particularly during rites of initiation, substitute themselves for women, taking their place as the guarantors of the social system. Knight cites one of the male participants in these rites:

“But really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women), for it is mostly all woman’s business; and since it concerns them it belongs to them. Men have nothing to do really, except copulate, it belongs to the women. All that belonging to those Wauwalak, the baby, the blood, the yelling, the dancing, all that concerns the women; but every time we have to trick them. Women can’t see what men are doing, although it really is their own business, but we can see their side. This is because all the Dreaming business came out of women – everything; only men take ‘picture’ for that Julunggul [i.e. men make an artificial reproduction of the Snake]. In the beginning we had nothing because men had been doing nothing ; we took these things from women.”

According to Knight, the Aborigines have maintained in their myths and ritual practices the memory trace of a critical moment in the evolution of culture – the moment when men overthrew the existing order and imposed masculine domination. This could only occur through a revolution in symbolic representations. The Snake would no longer swallow women.

The primal scene?

Knight knows that the story he tells is but one among many. But, he claims, his is a special kind of story, for though it is indeed a myth, it is a scientific myth. He believes that science must be liberating. His story, he says, may aid progressive forces in their struggle against the dominant ideology, and help give them back the confidence that they have lost since the 70s, to dream once more of revolution. In an England where the Left is in disarray, where the Labour Party is in the hands of an admirer of Mrs. Thatcher, one may understand why Knight – who cites Ken Livingstone in his list of acknowledgments – wants to find new foundations upon which to construct a radical critique of society. But at what price? In order to construct his myth, Knight is forced into simplification and abstraction from the cultural whole. Thus, he says at one point that for the populations from which our species sprang there is a moment when blood is only blood and all blood is alike. However, it is known that in hunter-gatherer societies, blood can only be understood in its relationship to other bodily fluids – milk, sperm and bile. And it is also the case that blood is multiple. But this complexity would put a brake upon the sociobiological imagination, just as the recognition of similar inter-relationships put a brake on the project of Taylor and Frazer. Perhaps that is why Knight – with much precaution – is willing to accept the concept of ‘meme’. As he says :

“I intend to draw on this parallel between ‘genes’ and ‘memes’ not because I find the analogies convincing … but because this way of looking at matters helps to validate my own narrative of a ‘human revolution’ which transported evolution beyond the parameters of ordinary Darwinism.”

Memology allows cultural elements to be abstracted from their contexts, and permits the identification within a rite or social practice of forms or formulas that are susceptible to being thus abstracted. But one of the problems of this approach is that it is always tempting to do nothing other than to project upon our distant past the configurations of our own desires. Knight sees the trap:

“Although I scarcely understood its scientific complexities, sociobiology by this stage did not simply repel me, despite its obvious political roots. Indeed, I warmed to its ideological excesses. They seemed to promise for the first time a publicly communicable way of validating my own narrative. If the stockbrokers, the company directors and the bourgeois feminists could be uninhibited about projecting their purely political constructs into primatological and palaeoanthropological debate – then how could they object to a socialist doing the same? Obviously, it seemed to me, they could not object in principle. The bone of contention could only be the extent to which – if at all – our respective grids worked.”

He admits, then, to projecting onto the canvas that he has imagined his own political values and hopes. But it is possible that other, less well-controlled material, has also made its way into the picture. At the centre of his myth, we find the moment of revolution itself. We have already caught a glimpse of what we may justifiably refer to as the ‘primal scene’ in the dance of the Sharanahua women. But how did the first fully human females put their revolt into practice?

“Let us return to the imagined protohuman population still only tentatively pursuing the new strategy. Genetically this population would be heterogeneous, with some females more desirable in male eyes – and more interested in sex – than others … In reality, the whole purpose of female strike action would have been not to avoid sex altogether, but to make males go away only temporarily – and then to come back home with meat. Not only does this assume that males are motivated to return to females. It also implies that females can enjoy sex sufficiently to have something to offer when the males do return … Because of this, the new system could have worked only on the reverse basis, with those females most wanted by males being among the first to get organised.”

At the very centre of our cultural revolution, then, we find the most voluptuous women. Knight goes on:

Given the logic just outlined, females set on following the new strategy would clearly have done best if they could (a) arouse the sexual motivations of males prior to each hunting exhibition whilst (b) making absolutely sure that no actual sex – no consummation or fulfilment – was allowed. The need, then, would have been to find a balance, sharpening the edge of the strike weapon not by disclaiming all sexual interests – but rather by dangling before the hunters’ eyes the rewards in store for them once their tasks had been performed.

Here it is that we find the origins of clothing. Quoting Lystistrata’s oath (“I will live at home without any sexual activity, wearing my best make-up and my most seductive dresses, to inflame my husband’s ardour”), he writes :

“Bangles, beads, necklaces and other adornments, many in the form of pierced marine shells, appear suddenly in the archaeological record in great abundance during the very earliest stages of the Upper Paleolithic. Doubtless, they were accompanied by pigments, pubic coverings, shawls, tassels and other items of ornamental clothing made of materials which have unfortunately not survived. Taken together – and leaving aside the possible physical functions such as protection or warmth – these items would have conveyed symbolic information on various levels. Firstly, they would have helped combine bodily concealment with allurement. We can imagine women deliberately dressing up – and very probably also dressing one another up – in order to mark the start of each ‘strike’.”

Knight sees a (fairly reduced) role for the older women, but at the centre of his vision we find the young women and the young men. Mature men, children – and one may imagine that in the emergence of humanity, the relationship between mother and child will have been of some importance – are thrust to one side. This is exactly what we see in the dance of the Sharanahua of which he makes so much, and in which only the young are involved. But while the rites that surround the sexuality and the alliance of the young are often of great importance in human societies, it is very rare for these questions to be left to the entire discretion of the adolescents themselves. We may wonder whether Knight has not – at the very centre of his construction – allowed memic simplification to reduce the play of culture to a sort of night-club for teenagers.

Conclusion

The philosopher Mary Midgely has said that evolution is our Creation Myth, and that we could characterize it as a religion. Scientists like Crick or Wilson base upon it their projections of a radiant future when scientists, finally getting rid of ordinary human beings, will be free to shape the world as they wish. Knight does not share their elitism – as we have seen he believes that his enterprise is a leftist response to the conservatism which he detects within sociobiology. But, similar in this to his adversaries, he has a teleological conception of evolution. Thus it is that, from time to time, one may detect a note of irritation towards our ancestors – why did it take them so long to invent culture? But while Kipling, in imagining the origins of the alphabet, projects the bourgeois family back into our prehistory, Knight sends the striker, the feminist, and the political militant back into the past.

Has he succeeded? If by that you mean has he made a contribution to the debates within the domain in which he situates his work, one may say that he has met with some recognition; Blood Relations has been read and commented on by palaeoanthropologists and sociobiologists – and a certain number of young researchers such as Camilla Power have signed themselves on board. Knight himself, as a militant socialist, has published articles intended to popularize his ideas in left-wing journals. Even if he has not gained the popular audience that Engels or Morgan achieved with their versions of evolutionary theory at the end of the 19th Century, he may imagine with some confidence that his works will be read in some working-class homes. Knight has also contributed to bringing about a renaissance of evolutionary cultural theory within academic anthropology – although he was not by any means on his own here. To some extent, he has benefited from the swing of the pendulum; a generation of anthropologists who read Ardrey or Lorenz in their youth has joined the few voices – like that of Robin Fox – which have steadily rejected the idea that culture is an autonomous domain, ultimately inexplicable, as Boaz had characterized it. But he has also contributed to it; it was under his impulsion that the colloquium ‘Ritual and the Origins of Culture’, held at the School of Oriental and African studies was held in 1994, and gave rise to an edited volume bringing together the work of psychologists, anthropologists and historians in an attempt to outline the biological origins of rites, and their place in the evolution of our species.

Problems remain: some paleoanthropologists still believe that traces of culture can be found among the Neanderthals – for Knight, it is important to argue that the latter were displaced by modern humans because they did not possess culture. And one may also add that Knight’s myth can only hold if one ignores the contributions to culture that must have been made by the long and intimate relationships between mother and child, between brothers and

sisters – among chimpanzees, where infants remain attached to their mothers for a long time, social placement and a rough version of lineage can be seen.

But to conclude, we shall need to leave the field that Knight claims as his own. Well before he studied anthropology, Knight did an MPhil in Russian Literature at Sussex University. His first culture is literary – as one might expect, he cites Robert Graves, he quotes Propp, and he has read Girard. As a story-teller, he is not naive. He knows that he is offering at the same time a myth, a scientific theory and an autobiographical novel. It is a Dickensian story – ‘Great Expectations’, perhaps – that of a young man who seeks to make his way in a world both threatening and exciting, a young man who catches a glimpse of the love of his life in the light of a palaeolithic camp-fire, who loses sight of her in his quest for the truth of the world and the authenticity of his soul, but who nevertheless keeps his flame alight, hoping to find her again in a better world towards the forging of which he will himself have contributed. Knight’s hero is worthy of love, for as a true Romantic lover, he has long laboured at the construction of his beloved.

Is it because he inserts himself into the story he tells, because he continually lets the reader know that he himself is not duped by the tale, that he manages at least to suggest that, while he may not completely convince, he does offer a way out of the present impasse? Sociobiology, even when practiced by those who are not inveterate conservatives – and not all of its adepts are – has trouble doing much other than to sing to what is – or at least to what they imagine is inscribed in our genes. Memology, in its turn, submits us to the tyranny of ideas or of rites – Dawkins, for example, sees religion as a kind of virus against which ordinary men have little defence. Knight offers us a model of the birth of culture in which, born in the practices and needs which are firmly rooted in our biological nature, it nevertheless takes form in the real will of our ancestors to impose a collective and liberatory solution to a common problem.

Bibliography

Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin, London & New York, 1986.

Dunbar, Robin, Chris Knight & Camilla Power (eds.), The Evolution of Culture, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999.

Frazer, James, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic & Religion, (Abridged Edition), Papermac, London, 1987.

Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions : Gender, Race & Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, New York & London, 1989.

Knight, Chris, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1991.

Knight, Chris, Sex and Language as Pretend Play, in Dunbar, Knight & Power, 1999, pp. 228-247.

Midgely, Mary, Evolution as Religion: A Comparison of Prophecies, Zygon, vol. 22, No. 2 (June 1987), pp. 179-194. 10