Blood plays such a very interesting role in magic, whether real or imagined by others. I've heard some fantastic stories of what witches, wiccans, and pagans do with blood in their rituals. Things that range from drinking it to using it as a lubricant for sex rites, and everything in between.
Blood has always held a fascination for me, particularly my own blood. I don't faint at the sight of blood, nor do I necessarily find the smell nauseating unless it's a large amount that's been left to rot and get heated up by the sun. But that's a rare situation for me, which I'm quite thankful for.
As far back as I can remember, I was told about the horrors of being a woman and having to deal with "that time of the month". I had my first period when I was 11 or 12 years old [I just remember that I was in sixth grade and had already developed big boobs a year or two earlier]. I was "cursed" with cramps and a heavier flow. Those are hard enough to deal with for some people, but I was also "cursed" with irregular periods. After witnessing the precision regularity of my mother's cycles for my entire life, I'd expected to be the same way. She told me some years later that she'd been irregular until she had me and my sister. So I always held out the hope that having children one day would regulate me, too.
With only one miscarriage to account for, I have remained irregular for the better part of thirty years now. For the past half dozen years or so, I've been tracking my cycles via the My Monthly Cycles site. Not only am I irregular, my cycles tend to fluctuate between five and six weeks, which has led me to calling my periods my "five-weekly gifts". Which means I bet my chances of getting pregnant in years past would have been a study in frustration… Oh well. That path was not meant for me, regardless of how much I wanted it.
But as I grew in my spirituality, particularly upon moving from the Christian faith to the Wiccan faith, I found myself more interested in the way my five-weekly gifts worked with my spirituality. I've read about the red tents and menstrual huts of old and found them absolutely fascinating, particularly the sense of camaraderie that seemed to come about because of this shared biological process. I'd heard about women who would celebrate their cycles -- pain, mess, and all -- as their sacred connection to feminine energies. They would go so far as to bottle their menstrual blood for ritual use. Some would use this blood in artwork, mixing it into their artistic mediums before making creations. I will admit that a part of me found this repulsive, but then I realized that I was reacting based on the societal expectations and beliefs about menstruation and menstrual blood.
I will admit that I have been tempted in the past to try this form of creativity, particularly for projects that I would keep for myself. Talk about having a personally charged ritual item! I mean, I've blooded myself for ritual items in the past, usually on my hands. What difference would it make if that blood was menstrual versus the stuff still running in my veins?
An online pagan friend uses her menstrual blood to charge a stone she keeps with some of her ritual and divinatory items, as a way to renew her connection to them. In the last couple of years, I have found myself wanting to do something similar. My thought was to get a plant that would be connected to both my creativity and my spirituality, and I would put a small amount of my own menstrual blood into the soil each cycle. I even bought a small grouping of cacti at one point to do this, but it never went anywhere [and the cacti died anyway]. Interestingly enough, I've been having a kind of existential angst and ennui over my spirituality [or lack thereof], practically since I first got this idea into my head, and nothing that I've tried so far as helped resolve that angst and ennui. I think it's time to do some research into plants that are attuned to both spirituality and creativity and put this project into practice. If I do this, I plan to start on Samhain, simply because I prefer to start a lot of my "permanent" and/or year and a day projects then. I will have to decide if I want to start said plant from a seed or purchase an existing plant. I think that will depend on what plant I choose to utilize.
To me, blood isn't icky or gross. It's a part of life and, as such, it should be a part of my spiritual beliefs and practices.
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