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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the relationship between lunar periodicity and gender in a very wide-spread indigenous American myth dealing with the origin of the moon’s spots. This is done by comparing it to structurally related myths as well as by drawing on cognitive evolution theory.

Paper long abstract

Focusing on what is perhaps the most widespread of all indigenous American myths, which explains the origin of the spots on the moon, this paper treats this set of myths as part of an even larger set of myths that explain the cosmogony, in structural terms, as the differentiation of primordial wholeness. Moon’s incestuous nature and androgyny are treated as homologous motifs. Seen against this wider backdrop, gender moves between a normative, differentiated state and a primordial, undifferentiated state – androgyny. Likewise, lunar, solar, and menstrual periodicity are set in opposition to a primordial undifferentiated state characterised by a sheer lack of periodicity. This is explained in terms of cognitive evolution theory, specifically the evolution of language. Language, through its power of differentiation, imposes normative structures on the human cosmos that are potentially divisive and can be exploited as such, if the material conditions are right, to gain political power and privilege. Ritual androgyny is a major feature of rites of inversion and can be seen as part of a general anti-structural ritual/artistic process in which the normative structures of the established social order are dissolved and boundaries are transgressed in order to return to a “primordial” state of communitas. The human limbic system is thus temporarily liberated from the alienating strictures of the differentiated cosmos demarcated by language-based thought. The moon, for various reasons, plays a central role in these liberating ritual/aesthetic processes.