Metaformic Theory

Key Concepts

Metaformic Consciousness

Metaformic consciousness developed in a period of Chaos, which in this context is a pre-language consciousness "when our pre-human ancestors could not perceive shape, color, light, depth, distance, as we do, and had no names for them and no fixed sense of their qualities." Separation from above and below was another common feature of seclusion rites. When in seclusion, the menstruant often was made to lay down or stay up in a tree for the remainder of her cycle, creating a physical separation from above and below.

Ancient cultures used menstrual imagery to explain and connect the events around them. Menstrual rites, once established, also provided ways to organize other aspects of life, including childbirth, illness and death. People also used metaforms as a tool to understand cause and effect and nature's patterns. They could then begin to predict events such as rainfall and other natural phenomena. By sharing and externalizing metaformic consciousness, our pre-human ancestors left Chaos.

Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove point out that, "Our words for 'mind' and 'civilization' came from words which mean 'moon experience, referring to the connection between menstruation and the moon.

The Four Categories of Metaforms

Based on content, all metaforms fall into four categories: Wilderness, Cosmetic, Narrative, and Material.

Wilderness

Wilderness metaforms often include creatures, formations, and elements of nature that depict menstrual ideas. The most common wilderness metaforms feature a creature attracted to female blood or possessing a suggestively feminine shape. The theory analyzes the ways in which many ancient cultures used a variety of animals in metaformic mythology.

The Wild Dog family, a common deity of tribes in Africa, Eurasia, and North and South America, is commonly used in such mythologies of ancient cultures. The wild dogs, attracted to the smell of blood, created a necessity of seclusion for menstruating women during ancient times. This necessity led to women's menstrual seclusion rites, such as huts built in trees or burying the menstruant and her scents waist deep in a pit with a shelter over her. This seclusion may be seen as a sacrifice to keep the tribe safe from predators, as they were attracted to the smell of blood and the farther the menstruant was from her tribe, the safer they were.

Snakes often appear in metaformic mythologies, such as the Wawilak Sisters Snake myth of Australian aboriginal people. Deities from many different cultures are presented in the form of a snake or serpent. In Central America, the Aztec goddess of creation was a snake and in ancient Greece, Gaia, the earth goddess, was a serpent.

Cosmetic

Cosmetic metaforms use "human body action, artful movement, shape, ornament and decoration, and even ingestion of meaningful foods", to depict methods of organization of the world. Cosmetic metaforms are the ways in which menstruation rites were made visible upon women's bodies, through various forms of modifications. For many cultures, cosmetic expression after the conclusion of menstrual seclusion was a very specific way of displaying a woman's unique knowledge gained through her experience. Some metaforms were expressed through temporary modifications like painting or dying, while others were more permanent modifications like tattoos, scarification, and embedded objects.

Narrative

Narrative metaforms are based on language, stories, numbers, and sound that "came about as people imagined themselves and their originators to be characters in a life cycle."

Material

Material metaforms express our current external cultural ideas through crafting goods from earthen materials. Necklaces themselves are metaformic, representing the vagina that has powers of creation and destruction. Ancient women crafted jewelry to contain emerging knowledge relating to menstruation and the way the world was organized, fashioning their ontological worldview. Jewelry functions as an expression of human consciousness, abstract thinking, and enhances powers while being an art form made from natural materials.

Another material metaform is the rose which is given as a gift to show love and respect, but fundamentally symbolizing the vulva in its blood red form. This plant has been cultivated and crafted through horticulture, made by humans to share and pass on metaformic consciousness.

Ethnomathematics

Mathematician John Kellermeier posits mathematics as quantitative techniques which humans developed as a survival response. Many other scholars also contend that women invented timekeeping through charting their menses on various animal bones and beads.

Lunar calendars were not only methods for measuring time; they indicated both the phases of the moon and a woman’s menstrual cycle. Lunar markings found on prehistoric bone fragments show how early women tracked their cycles and planned families in correlation with the phases of the moon. The prehistoric calendar bones include the Ishango bone, the most well known, which was discovered on the shore of a lake in Zaire, Africa, and represented a six-month lunar calendar. The Isturitz Baton represented both a five- and four-month lunar calendar. The Blanchard Bone Plaque represented a two-month lunar calendar.

The invention of using beads to family plan is due to the direct correlation of women's menstrual cycles with the lunar cycle.

Much of the evidence on lunar calendars are from the Paleolithic period and characterized by the development of venus or feminine figurines. These "exact lunar tallies [that] fall within ... a complex storied tradition involving at the center a female creatrix figure and all of her characteristic symbols", according to the anthropologist Alexander Marshack. Feminine figures, such as Venus of Willendorf and Venus of Laussel, bear traces of having been covered in red ochre.

Music

Singer and songwriter Polly Wood composed an anthem for metaformia called Bledsung. Wood performed Bledsung live at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, California, for the "Goddesses Sing" show on January 25, 2008.

Film

The 2011 film, Poomarem, which means flowering tree, by Vijay Vipan, illustrates many of the core concepts of metaformic theory. Poomarem focuses on the "menstrual origins of sciences and arts, such as geometry, time, painting, and cooking; and also the violence, and the isolation that inevitably accompany the loss of women's rituals within a society."

Vipan states that this film is "A new relational origin story that women's menstrual rituals are the roots of human culture and that in human evolution women and men have markedly different relationships to blood." This film was shown at the 2011 Rotterdam International Film Festival held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

References

References

1. Gajus, Gregory, http://www.metaformia.org/articles/soaked-in-semen-and-blood/
2. Grahn, Judy. (1993). "Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World". Beacon Press.
3. Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture. (2005)
4. Frazer. (1930). "The Golden Bough vol. 1". Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Company.
5. (1988). "The Wise Wound: The Myths, Reality, and the Meaning of Menstruation". Grove Press.
6. Kellermeier, John. "How Menstruation Created Mathematics*".
7. Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. (2005). "She is Everywhere!: An Anthology of Writing in Womanist/Feminist Spirituality". iUniverse.
8. Noble, Vicki. (1991). "Shakti Woman: Feeling our Fire, Healing our World, the New Female Shamanism". Harper San Francisco.
9. "Bledsung: by Polly Wood". Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture.
10. "South Indian Filmmaker Takes on Metaformic Theory". Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture.
11. "A Flowering Tree". International Film Festival Rotterdam.