Prehistoric Visions

In the morning twilight between sleep and awakening on the first day of the year this thought shaped in my mind and raced through its neurones as a certainty:

The prehistoric move from hunter to farmer was spiritual and linked to the mystery of the female.

A woman menstruates and can give birth, the physical relation being occult to the caveman he finds a magical explanation:

The earth gives birth, life in shape of little insects and larger animals crawls in its inside and a 'dead' heap of turf can give life to worms... Mother earth therefore is the power of creation and linked in a mystical way to the woman, herself able to create life. The link between both is the menstrual blood. Blood that carries the essence of life. The monthly shed blood is given to the earth as a bond. The woman gives her blood as natural sacrifice from the dark internal cavern from which life comes forth into the light and that in a rhythm linked to the light of the moon. She doesn't do it voluntarily it happens to her, the magic happens and is larger than her- divine. Through this sacrifice she acquires from the earth the boon to give life. ( proof is that without this sacrifice she doesn't conceive and when she has conceived the sacrifice is suspended because the power of the blood is now in her). woman is keeper of this power, she is priestess of creation of the endless cycle of life and resurrection of life.

Man doesn't have this force in him, his means of serving the Mother Earth are different. Either he imitates the menstrual blood ( see Aboriginals' men's rituals ), or he sacrifices himself so that his blood and body can feed creation and make it grow. ( see my blog entry on ritual sacrifice of the leader in prehistoric times) Maybe he sacrifices a part of his body to acquire magical power ( pictures of mutilated hands in prehistoric caverns).

But man has another magic, the magic of the hunt. The link between him and his victim. In prehistoric times any killing created a bond in between the slayer and his victim with certain obligations to the slayer so as to not disturb the creational and resurrectional cycle of life. Man can offer through this magical link not his own blood but that of the animal he slays. And there is an animal that is synonymous for virile forces, muscles, strength, impetuous, armed with horns, and in communion with the earth since it feeds on its fruits- the bull.

There are numerous engravings left from prehistoric times showing the slaying of a bull with a moon (= equivalent to the menstrual blood), by a lion or a man ( the lion being an eater of flesh represents the slayer) through a ritual knife and out of his wound grows a plant.

Was the menstrual blood and the bull blood necessary to make plants grow? Did it enhance the growth of plants through the contained minerals and thus created the myth that the mystery of creation of Mother Earth could be mastered if only there was sufficient 'fertilizer ' in shape of bodies or blood ? Does the plant thus become sacred, spiritual food or sacred grain that can be sown by those who came to seek it at the sanctuary? Was the beginning of agriculture the adoption of a rite?