Menstruation as the Basis for Measurement

Photo From “Blood, Bread and Roses” by Judy Grahn

Menstruation as the Basis for Measurement
“From Blood, Bread and Roses – How Menstruation Created the World” by Judy Grahn

A bold argument, one that she calls “ultimately unprovable”. With confidence Judy Grahn calls our earliest “ancestress” primates the originators of scientific measurement. She marks the alignment of a woman’s bleeding and cycling body with the cycle of the moon as the original internal/external relational measure. She says that only through comparison and relationship can humans experience measurement. Before there was language, art, poetry or ritual there was menstruation. It was women who discovered the cyclic rhythm that aligned her body with that of the moon so many millions of years ago.

Even the reference to our ancestors as intelligent females making ground breaking discoveries echoes in my mind as a contradiction to every historical reference to ancestral “man” that was made throughout my Western education.

Gender oppression is so woven into the fabric of western education that when I even think about our ancestral primates I think – Male. My world view has just been opened to think of my earliest ancestors as both female and male. Shifting my thinking in this way helps to strengthen the thread of connection that I have to my ancestral line that goes back millions of years.

Now that I can relate to my female ancestors I can go one step further. I can dream that perhaps they were even making ground breaking relational discoveries that would change the fate of the human race by forming the basis of understanding for measurement. What beautiful and radical expansion! Check out more of Judy Grahn’s work here. (Category – Moontime Connection) (Tags – Menstruation, Primates, Measurement, Cycles)