From the earliest cultures, the magic of creation was thought to reside in the blood that women gave forth in harmony with the moon, as in the older female-oriented creation myth recounting the creation of man from clay and moon-blood. The Gnostic Christians like the Ophites, practiced the “spiritual marriage”. During this, the woman and the man take the man’s seed into their hands, stand up, offering it to the Father, as the body of Christ, and they do likewise with the woman’s moon-blood as Christ’s Blood. This was considered more “spiritual” than eating the transmuted form of bread and wine. When the semen made molten by the fire of great passion falls into the lotus of the “mother” and mixes with the red element, the man achieves “the conventional mandala of the thought of enlightenment.”

The same “magic blood” that made women leaders in the ancient systems made them objects of fear under the new patriarchal faith. Now masculine and symbolic, the holy “blood of life” used to be feminine and real.

-- Walker, Barbara G., The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1983. Pages 635, 640-644.