#I'll talk a little more about this later but acting like menstruation is painless normally and the pain comes from internalized misogyny

[bijoumikhawal]

The two authors refer to the blood of the Grail cup as menstrual blood and their interpretations of the Grail legend in psychological terms seems to have influenced The Dreamer of the Vine (1980), a historical novel about Nostradamus’ life. Its author, Liz Greene, an astrologer and Jungian psychologist, suggests that Nostradamus might have known about the true identity of Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s companion and the mother of his children. Greene is the sister of Richard Leigh, coauthor of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), and she clearly influenced the three authors’ research for this latter book. Shuttle and Redgrove’s book appears to be the theoretical foundation not only for most of the pilgrims’ theories and their menstrual offerings but also for the most popular theories about Mary Magdalene relating her with the Holy Grail.

According to Shuttle and Redgrove, menstruation is a blessing that was turned into a curse and this inversion, labeling more than half the world’s population as inferior, may explain the aggressiveness of Western civilization. On page after page, issues appear that return again and again in later popular books about Mary Magdalene and female spirituality. After describing the Song of Songs as “an anti-Bible within the Bible” and “a poem of Tantric vividness,” the authors denounce the split created by Christianity between the childless lover and the mother and refer to Mary Magdalene as “the prostitute: the woman who had sex without having a child” and to the Virgin Mary as “the woman who had a child without having sex.” In Christian terms, menstruation therefore appears as Eve’s curse and evokes fear and pain. But if a woman learns not to be afraid of her sexuality and the monthly blood she sheds, neither menstruation nor childbirth need to be painful experiences. Menstruation is seen like “a moment of truth which will not sustain lies” and leads women to face the lies Western society is based upon: “It is as though the two kinds of love-juice, the red and the white, the childless and the child-giving, corresponded with these two aspects of woman’s nature. It is the red aspect which is despised, tabooed, neglected, and which, as if in response to this spiteful treatment, in many women hurts... But we can see how shocking an unaccustomed attitude to menstruation may be if we think of the Virgin Mary menstruating.”

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The pilgrims presented their theories as antipatriarchal and revolutionary, but many of the texts they drew upon took for granted certain assumptions about women and their reproductive cycle. Feminist critiques of scientific discourse about the female reproductive cycle have analysed the strategies of portraying the bodies of women as totally different from those of men. The discourse labels women’s bodies as dysfunctional and exposed to physical changes like menstruation and menopause that make women lose control, and has been used to justify sexual inequality. As with the Gregorian Magdalene that the pilgrims criticized but could not do without, it seems that they could not totally reject certain assumptions about the female body because they needed them as a starting point for their spiritual theories and practices.

147-149, Looking for Mary Magdalene by Anna Fedele