Sacred or Profane? Menstruation in Religious Ritual -- Shelby Goodwin
In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas argues that societal beliefs about bodily pollution mirror beliefs about the social order, including social hierarchies. Douglas views the margins of the body as particularly dangerous: “Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, feces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body” (Douglas 1966:150). Furthermore, she writes that the significance of this traversing of boundaries varies across cultures, since “... each culture has its own special risks and problems” (Douglas 1966:150). For example, while menstrual blood is largely considered “dirty” and taboo, it holds a wide range of meanings in different social, historical, and cultural contexts.
In some contexts, menstrual blood is so profane that currently menstruating people are prohibited from places of worship. In others, menstrual blood is sacred, as is the case in the image I have selected. The image depicts deities at Kamakhya Temple (in Assam, India) during the annual Ambubachi Mela. At this Mela, devotees celebrate the menstruation of the Goddess Kamakhya. The reverence toward her menstruation period is further exemplified by what lies at the heart of the temple: a stone representative of Kamakhya’s reproductive organs. However, it is worth noting that this is an abstract representation of the body. Devotees of Kamakhya may celebrate the “orifices of the body” when that body belongs to a Goddess, but what does the menstrual blood of an ordinary person signify to them?
While this social group’s beliefs about menstruation may vary on an individual basis, it is very likely that in some part of their social lives, menstrual blood takes the form of pollution. Perhaps the practice of revering the menstruation of a Goddess, while treating the menstruation of other bodies as taboo reifies a significant social distinction between the spiritual and the mundane. I think that the shifting meanings of menstruation across social realms reflects Douglas’ argument that ritual symbolism is not a matter of individual neuroses, but the creation of culture. Rituals “... enable people to know their own society. The rituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body” (Douglas 1966:159).
Works Cited
Carol, Mitchell. 2005. “Kamakhya Temple: Ganesh at Play.” From flickr.com. Retrieved
March 24, 2022 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/webethere/3204865225).
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. London and New York: Routledge.
This is such an insightful post on how Douglas's work on purity and pollution configures itself in relation to the concepts of sacred and profane in a super unique and fascinating topic. I definitely agree that the concept of menstruation being sacred for a goddess as opposed to profanity among regular people definitely helps to form a sense of social cohesion and thus represents the idea of ritual formed from culture. I also immediately thought about the Kumari Devi in Nepal, who are young girls considered to be avatars of the goddess Durga but are thought to lose their divine power after their first period. With this in mind, how might positions like the Kumari fit into this notion of the sacred and profane, or set apart and ordinary? Is there a necessarily strict delineation between the two? How does the margin of the body (in this case menstruation) fit into the loss of holiness?
ReplyDeleteI also wrote on Mary Douglas' analysis of bodily pollution and enjoyed how you mentioned that the menstrual blood of mundane women gets called into question when compared to a goddess, who perhaps is exempt from mortal judgement that dictates pure from impure. You seamlessly wove in the concepts of the sacred and profane; I wonder, though, if this celebration relates to "anxiety about bodily margins [expressing[ danger to group survival" (1966:154). How does the bodily politic become threatened, yet drawn to the margins of digestive and reproductive processes? Why is menstrual blood considered 'dirty' yet and polluting yet conducive to autoplastic manipulation?
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