Prophecy + Payment: Why We Return Our Monthly Blood to the Earth

Claire Yaseed
Sep 16, 2024
8 min read

Updated: Sep 23, 2024

There is a well-known Hopi prophecy that states:

"When the women give their blood back to the earth, the men will come home from war and earth shall find peace."

When I think about this prophecy and the weight that it holds, it reminds me of the week that my partner and I spent in the mountains outside of Medellin, Colombia with an elder and medicine man of the Wiwa nation (originally from the Sierra Nevada region of Colombia). One evening, during a consultation, the elder shared with us that a large reason why the earth is suffering so deeply and going through a period of “extreme heat” is because women are bleeding onto tampons and pads that are then getting burnt in landfills. In his people’s cosmology (and the cosmologies of many intact lineages around the world), menstrual blood is viewed as a “hot” substance that needs to be cooled in order for the immense spiritual force of the bodily fluid to be calmed and transformed. From his perspective, menstrual blood should either always be returned directly to the earth or to the water—the two “cooling” elements—in order for the spiritual heat to be neutralized and rebalanced once more. In this process, the woman’s blood helps to nourish and nurture the land and waters of the territory and completes a woman’s ceremonial experience of her monthly bleed. The woman’s blood is also viewed as a “pagamento”, a sacred payment and spiritual offering to the earth that is freely given as a way to bring the delicate equilibrium of nature back into right relationship.

Many other indigenous elders and teachers have shared similar visions with me in regard to menstrual blood, always reminding me of the power that my blood holds and the responsibility that I, in turn, hold in being a woman who bleeds. In spending so much time in indigenous communities and being given the opportunity to truly honor my moon time, I can’t help but reflect on and question the current menstrual care practices (or, rather, lack thereof) that women participate in in the West. The glaringly obvious one is, of course, the use of disposable tampons and pads and the horrendous impact that they have on women’s bodies and the environment. My mind immediately goes to all of the toxins, endocrine disruptors, and carcinogens (aka CANCER CAUSING CHEMICALS) that women are taking into their vaginas which is not only the most absorbent tissue that exists in the human body but also the sacred channel through which human life is brought forth into the world. I think about all of the female reproductive health issues and spiritual blockages that are either created and/or triggered by menstrual and vaginal “care” products that deodorize the natural, healthy, and normal scent of the female body. I think about the shame and pain and trauma that women associate with their monthly bleed. I think about my mother and my sisters and my aunties and my grandmothers and my female cousins and my future female descendants and I want to rage and scream and cry all at the same time. The generations upon generations of shame and pain around our blood and our wombs and our femaleness and our womanhood feel insurmountable at times, even through all the work that I’ve done to come into right relationship and clean my lineage of this disconnection and desecration.

My mind goes to the ceremony of our blood that has been stolen from us. It goes to the deep, innate knowing that the moon time is a monthly initiation of profound intuition and cosmic connection. I think about the day that I humbly and curiously went to my teacher, Abuelo Querubin, and asked him what I should be doing with my blood every month. “Go to the river,” he told me. “Give your blood back to the water.” Because what is menstrual blood if not the water of the womb, the water of life? What is it that so many land defenders and water protectors around the world repeat, over and over again? WATER IS LIFE. Water is life.

Our blood is the water of life and life cannot continue forth without it. Then comes the question or, rather, the offering of spiritual payment…what responsibility do I have as a bleeding woman to willingly offer my life force energy back to the waters, back to the earth?

Something that I have been observing and questioning for years is the various ways in which Western women misunderstand the power of their menstrual blood, the two most obvious being the trend of painting/creating art with menstrual blood and the trend of putting menstrual blood on the skin as a “face mask". Now, I take issue with these two warped ways of interacting with menstrual blood not because I think that our blood is dirty, disgusting, polluted, or impure but, rather, because I view our blood as one of, if not the, most powerful and sacred substances on earth. As I mentioned in my recent podcast episode, “Remembering the Red Tent: Coming Into Right Relationship With My Monthly Blood”, my elder teachers of the Cofan lineage view menstrual blood as being more spiritually powerful than the medicine of yage (the Colombian brew of ayahuasca). Therefore, in the same way that I would never use the medicine of yage as a paint nor as a face mask, I question how and why Western and predominantly white women of European descent have such a warped and distorted relationship with our blood. How is it that we have collectively forgotten that our monthly blood is our most sacred spiritual gift as women outside of (yet intricately connected to) our ability to create, birth, and nurture human life? How is it that we have forgotten our role and responsibility as bleeding women to willingly offer our blood back to the earth and the waters as a form of spiritual payment?

Let us return to the Hopi prophecy of the moon blood and attempt to understand the true weight of these words:

"When the women give their blood back to the earth, the men will come home from war and earth shall find peace."

The inevitable first question is: Why would the men come home from war just because the women are remembering to freely give their blood back to the earth? Where is the connection between menstruation and armed conflict?

Well, the link is actually quite obvious and quite simple. The earth demands spiritual payment in the form of blood (aka life force energy) in order to maintain the divine dance of sacred reciprocity between all living beings. Thus, if the women have forgotten and/or chosen not to freely offer their blood—their life force energy—to the earth then the earth will find other ways to take what is rightfully hers in order to maintain this sacred balance. Consequently, when women no longer freely offer their menstrual blood to the earth and the waters, men will have their blood taken by force by means of war, battle, and brutal conflict. Nature is neutral, blood is blood, and the earth will exact her spiritual payment in one way or another.

Now another layer to this prophecy, this original instruction, lies in the understanding that women giving their monthly blood back to the earth is neither a small nor unimportant aspect of returning the wombs of the world to their rightful seat of power. I say this because the war on the collective womb is systematic, strategic, and sneakily insidious. In writing this, I know that there will most likely be many, many women who will scoff at, make fun of, or be entirely confused as to why I am making such a big deal about returning our blood to the earth/water. There will be many women of reproductive age reading this who no longer get a monthly bleed due to various forms of hormonal birth control that shut down the original and natural design of their hormonal matrix. There will be many women who are extremely attached to certain perspectives/lineages of feminism that view the moon time as unimportant, uninteresting, and unworthy of our attention and care. These are the women who are the most detached and the most disembodied from their innate and irrefutable power as creators, carriers, and caretakers of the future generations.

For the war on the womb begins the moment that a woman is separated from her divine right to bleed in peace. To bleed while resting. To be taken care of while she is bleeding. This is where we got lost. This is where we will find ourselves once more.

I often think about the groups of second wave feminists from the 1960s and 70s who would get together and use a menstrual extraction device to vacuum out their endometrial lining each month so that their period would not “slow them down” and stop them from going to work. I imagine these women truly believing that this was an answer to their pain, trauma, and experiences of sex-based oppression. I imagine these women convincing themselves and others that it was their bleeding that kept them shackled to the chains of forced domesticity and unpaid/devalued care work. If I put myself in their shoes, I can understand why they would then decide to forcibly suction the menstrual substance (aka the home of a potential child) from their bodies so that they wouldn’t have to face the most obvious and most unavoidable truth of their inescapable womanhood: their blood.

From my perspective, these second wave feminists were not women but, rather, lost girls. Uninitiated children who were attempting to find their way towards womanhood in the most warped and most traumatizing way that I can imagine: ripping their blood from their bodies with a sterile medical device in the presence of other lost and uninitiated girls. Putting their pain on full display in front of an audience. Screaming to the world, “MY BLOOD IS THE PROBLEM!!!” without understanding that their blood was actually the solution. The sadness that this image evokes in me is one that may never be fully soothed in this lifetime. It is a wound that ripples out, so wide and so deep, that it will likely take many more lifetimes for me to fully clean it from my heart and my own womb.

In order for women to remember to give their blood back to the earth (as the prophecy reads) women have to first understand the value, importance, and sacredness of their blood. And in order for women to do that, they have to understand the value, importance, and sacredness of their womanhood. When a woman remembers the innate power that she holds as a member of the female sex, as the creator of the future generations, as the guardian and protector of her lineage, as the carrier of her culture, as the weaver of her people’s dreams and the voice of her people’s screams THAT is when she is finally ready to accept the responsibility that she has to give her blood—her life-force energy—back to the earth. Because she finally knows that her blood is not simply blood. It is a payment, willingly and lovingly offered. A pagamento. A prophecy waiting to be fulfilled.