Your Period is a Curse

History is not kind to women.

Eve and the Fall of Man. Jealous, vengeful goddesses. Evil queens. The most famous of them are beautiful seductresses and thus must "get around"––whether Creatrix, goddess, or queen–– because who else will there be to tell their story but the men they loved, crossed or manipulated. They don't get a voice. They only leave an impression.

The world is full of tales of bold women who shaped history, but they seem to exist outside of the mundane world, outside of the realm of possibility. They live on as impossible ethereal goddesses like Athena, Astarte and Aphrodite. Turn your eye to any continent and you'll find a goddess. Presently, because of my current research, my eye is on the Ancient Middle East (or Ancient Near East, depending on your perspective).

It is difficult to unwrap the motley crew of gods, goddesses, and spiritual beings that purveyed ancient Mesopotamia. Ananna or Ashera? Astarte or Astargartis? Many are the same deity going by a different name and some are combined, amalgamating as people migrated.

Some deities go out of style as they become forgotten. The god of the sea, for example, can go by many names, but does the same deity who inhabited the Mediterranean Sea inhabit the Red Sea? Is the Phoenician Yamm the same as Poisidon? Usually it is a local character behind a force of nature or an aspect of our world we try to understand. Nyx, in Egypt, was the "night sky".

Some, who started out maybe as a lesser deity––say, one man's household god, the "God of my Father"––get promoted and become the primal force of creation and shape the history of the world for generations to come. Their counterpart, the yin to their yang, and usually described as their consort, are shamed into something worse than obscurity. Infamy.

The more I learn about ancient culture, the more I understand our current culture and the less tolerant I become. Cultures throughout the history of the world have treated bold women as evil demonesses and the ruin of all mankind. Disney even does it.

To bring this to a personal level, our menstrual cycles as unclean and cursed. We are cursed. One week out of every month we feel pain and bleed and we are taught this happened because of one of two reasons: we are evil incarnate or we did something bad and that makes evil no matter how hard we try to be good. Even though, our ability to bleed means we should be fertile which is, I hear, highly coveted since it carries on the human race.

The repulsion and disdain for a woman's period is very perplexing. Allow me to entertain you with this excerpt from Pliny's Natural History:

"... it would be difficult to find anything more bizarre than a woman's menstrual flow. Proximity to it turns new wine sour, crops tainted with it are barren, grafts die, garden seedlings shrivel, fruit falls from the trees on which it is growing, mirrors are clouded by its very reflection, knife blades are blunted, the gleam of ivory dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are instantly corroded by rust and a dreadful smell contaminate the air."

This esteemed figure had a serious fear and misunderstanding of women, but so did his peers and perhaps even women themselves! If you were told all of your life you were wrong, evil, and whatever you touched would die then you might have some mental health issues.

This comes up because I am not only researching the way women were treated in ancient Mesopotamia during the time of my book (menstruating women were not allowed in temples, for one) but researching myths and deities.

In the Zoroastrian myths of creation Jahi (Jeh) is the personification of menstruation in women, a "mark" given to her by the evil adversary of Ahura Mazda, and she is the defiler of women, the "Wh0re", the temptress, and destroyer of men. One look from Jahi will kill you. She is described as a damp woman, moisture dripping from her hair, evoking a swamp maybe. Mildew. Decay. Death.

Compare Jahi to Eve of Old Testament lore.

Somehow, somewhere, a long, long time ago, this force that women carry inside our wombs, literally the doorway to life on this earth, has become the source of putridity. And it is still viewed that way today. It hasn't been so long in recent history that women have participated alongside men. We do everything we can to pretend that one week out of the month we aren't in pain, overcome by our emotions and hemorrhaging from our yonis.

To this, to all of this, I feel like evoking Anat, the Canaanite war goddess. Her ancient image is of a young seductress who goes to battle for her values and wads knee-deep in blood, slaying enemies and hanging their heads on her girdle. I feel like that almost every month on Day 2 of my period.

Okay, so, maybe men should be afraid of us. If another man calls me a "B" because I have an opinion or am a little testy and asks me if I'm on the rag, we're going to have an Anat-on-the-Warpath reenactment.

One of the themes in my current novel, as I mentioned earlier, is the pejoration of women in history. Before I knew I was going to write this book, I watched a lecture on The Great Courses Plus by Professor that describes how most words alluding to women become demeaning over time. I'm very fascinated with words.

Side Note: The word "literally" is coming to mean the opposite of its actual meaning. How many people say "It was literally a train wreck" when all they mean is that it was figuratively a train wreck. A train did not actually wreck. My husband is constantly reprimanding our children for this horrible misuse of the word "literally". However, I am a little kinder. This morphing of words into opposite and even different meanings is quite normal. This example of how the word "literally" is changing its meaning is a current representation of how language changes over time and not even that much time. I'm sure your parents know words you don't know and your children are saying or inventing new words too. And, if in doubt, read some original Shakespeare. Many of our common words were first seen in his plays, like "bedroom".

I digress. One example of this pejoration of women trend is the use of the word "girl" which actually began in the English language as a word for a child of either sex and here we are today when even the word "girl" can be demeaning to a woman and prostitutes are "call girls". Another example is the word "hussy" which comes from "housewife" in Old English.

Jahi has been given similar treatment. According to Encylocpaedia Iranica, early Avestan writings on the Zoroastrian creation myths use the term "jeh" to simply denote a woman and later writings translated it loosely as "wh0re". Jahi was probably just the "first woman" or a "Creatrix" and now she's demoted to a demon who walks around dripping wet with blood-red eyes.

I can't help but notice the similarity to the name Jezebel, subject of my book. Her name currently also refers to a loose, immoral woman, not to mention the impending arrival in Revelations of the "Whore of Babylon". In Hebrew, her name is written Isabel. There have been seals found from her era and the palace of her husband, Ahab, with YSBL, but archaeologists are apparently shy to declare them hers.

If you have seen the movie, Dirty Dancing, you will recognize a familiar motif in the story of "Baby" whose name is actually Francis. Her family does not respect her even though she is a bright individual who is self aware, but content in role. They could have called her "Girl", but, as I mentioned, that some negative meaning. But Baby works, beautifully.

So, "Baby", is content and happy to please everyone else until she meets Johnny, a viral dancer who awakens desires in her she didn't even know she had. Then "Baby" becomes a woman who eventually stands up for herself. During the climax at the dance party, Johnny (Patrick Swayze) says to her parents, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner."

Okay, goddesses. Time to get out of our corners.