Menstruation-”an ocean on fire” through modern and ancient eyes
In most patriarchal societies the female menstrual cycle was or still is viewed as “impure” in some way. From forbidding women to enter religious places which is the unofficial law in many countries, to forcing the menstruating woman to spend her period in isolation away from family which is the case mostly in poorly civilized countries, where women sometimes are forced to stay in terrible conditions by themselves.
Even nowadays in the West we can observe how the menstrual blood causes aversion and discomfort in men but also in some women due to them not being in touch with their true feminine nature. People are afraid of menstruation in a sense because it is a disturbing aspect to the mind of a civilized person living in a sanitized modern world. As menstrual blood in tantric teaching is described as “the nectar of immortality, the nectar of the Goddess. The ocean which is red in colour, containing the essence of life(=death) and so the essence of creation, the material of the great cycle.” it is of the opposite nature to a sterile(civilized) way of living.
Wikipedia: “Sterilization refers to any process that removes, kills, or deactivates all forms of life (particularly microorganisms such as fungi, bacteria, spores, and unicellular eukaryotic organisms) and other biological agents such as prions present in or on a specific surface, object, or fluid.”
In our modern age where dualism of mind is present in the vast majority of people’s perceptions, the female nature is the one thing most twisted, perverted, forced out of its natural shape and context due to the fact that women in their natural state consciously or unconsciously bring out the deep or hidden inner qualities of people around. The most frequent emotion stirred by the female form is anger resulting from sexual arousal, envy etc.
According to my own research which basically was me asking around, I sadly came to see that many men don’t want to have sexual activity with a woman who is on her period, giving either no explanaition why they feel that way, or responses like “It is simply wrong.” or even “Eww!”. I just want to point out that those specific two responses were from men who are very sexually active otherwise, that’s just two samples out of a big ocean of fish. Also worth mentioning is that the woman’s possible pain during menstruation didn’t come up at all in those discussions, as I was waiting for it but it didn’t seem to be an important factor for those men at all. Then and there I got convinced once again of the dualism present in people’s minds. Our society dissects the female nature and chooses parts of it to accept and others to reject according to its idea of “civilization” which is very far from nature’s truth(creation)at this point but is full of impurities and so is closer to nature’s state of destruction. The menstruation of a woman is correlated to nature’s destruction state, because it is the time of the cycle when the womb is being cleansed of its useless and at this point impure(disabling creation) material. The further and further away societies get from the pure state of mind rooted in the natural law, the closer they come to their downfall which is then always caused or initiated in some way by the women in those societies, because the necessary cleansing is just part of the female cycle not the male, it is part of the cycle of the Goddesses womb that we all live in on this earthly plane and the women are her vehicles to maintain the natural law. The seasons of weather, the cycle of the Moon, the cycle of life in nature where one animal gets eaten by a stronger one and similarly in the human world’s hustle, birth and death. This is all part of the (menstrual) cycle of the Goddess, and we are all entrapped in her womb.
The whole universe is the infinite body, the fertile field of creation of the Goddess containing all the galaxies within her. The individual stars in her universe -the Suns that are able to survive and shine within her are the points of masculine energy that lighten up each Galaxy, which in itself is a womb creating the heavenly bodies and their inhabitants.
Several belief systems around the world have said menstrual blood to be the matter of biggest energetic power, being the material of both creation and destruction, similar to semen being the material of creation, both having been used traditionally in rituals and divine offerings. Those are the finalized tissues, last of all to be produced by the body, containing the total essence of the prior stages as well as being the whole spiritual and physical concentration of the person.
Although many religious temples including Hindu ones refuse the visit of menstruating women, there are some like the Guwahati’s Maa Kamakhya Devalaya Temple in Guwahati, India that worship the menstruating Goddess (photo above). Naturally the river Brahmaputra turns red once per year which is the sign of the bleeding Goddess. That is when the temple closes to the public for three days and opens on the fourth day with great festivities. Celebrating the peak of cosmic fertility and creation after the bleeding.
As fire is the only element that cannot be polluted merges with another purifying and especially nourishing element of water, the menstrual blood-”the ocean on fire” becomes the cosmic nectar of immortality, enabling life to continue.
