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BLOODY WOMEN AND BLOODY SPACES (To view a footnote, click on its number; to return to your place in the article, hit the back button on your browser.) Blood, be it real, symbolic, sacrificial, menstrual, or divine, figures as a powerful force in negotiating and configuring space, be it sacred, profane, communal, private, or gendered. Moreover, different types of blood introduced into the same space potentially set up incompatible and dangerous relationships among the various individuals participating there. In this examination of blood and space, I will focus on three spatial settings within late-antique Judaism and Christianity, and likewise the interrelationship among them: 1) the sacrificial courtyard of the Jewish Temple in ancient Judaism—a palpably bloody sphere, 2) the altar area of ecclesiastical architecture—a bloody arena dedicated to the sacrificial blood of Christ, the Eucharist, and 3) women's bodily space—the monthly locus of generative, reproductive blood, or menses. As I approach these issues, I would like to offer an alternative articulation of the customary question "Who or what characterizes the sacred, profane, or sacrificial?" and instead inquire, "How have taxonomies such as sacred, profane, or sacrificial been constituted through both discursive and non-discursive forces, specifically through textual, artistic, liturgical, and architectural agencies?"1 Within the sacred boundaries of Jewish, Greek, and Roman temples, sacrificial blood represents the substance pleasing and desirable to the gods. It is often the mandatory presence of sacrificial blood, in fact, that renders a space sacred. Female reproductive blood, by contrast, possesses an altogether different potency. It carries the ability to defile entire ceremonial complexes if introduced within them, and is therefore excluded from them almost without exception. At first take, these different bloods and their contradictory effects seem to generate an implied dialectic between sacrificial blood as "sacred" and menses as "profane." But the dramatic tension that arises from the co-existence of the two charged bloods, and the array of legislative material barring menstruating women from sacred spaces, may reflect more than typical misogynistic attitudes. Indeed, as we shall see, what appears to be an absolute antipathy between the two fluids may arise from their kindred or similar powers of purification, life, and rebirth. The mimetic relationship, sometimes substantial and sometimes symbolic, between Christian liturgical spaces and ancient sacrificial spaces finds its strongest expression in the church's uneasy relationship to Judaism, Christianity's mother religion. The church's selective appropriation of Jewish purity laws and sacrificial symbolism suggests the degree to which Christianity also addresses the thorny rapport between sacrificial blood and reproductive blood. Christian literary and material evidence, in both the Medieval East and the West, reveals a great deal of anxiety about both the exclusion of Christian menstruants from sacred spaces as well as their proximity to the Eucharist itself. Moreover, spatial separateness between the two genres of blood shows up in palpable, material form. The development of architectural barriers, explicitly designed to sever incongruous spaces and substances, in turn divides worshipers within ancient and medieval religious compounds. In focusing on the critical role that blood plays in construing spatial meaning then, the first part of this essay seeks out points of resonance among ancient Jewish practices in the Jerusalem Temple and early Christian notions of gendered realms.
Bloody Temple The plan of Herod's Temple (Figure 2) reveals a building decidedly divided into courtyards; these in turn clearly distinguished the genre of substances and people allowed into them.2 The religious background, gender, and hierarchical status of the participant all worked together to define the nature of these segregated realms. The outer area of the Temple—the Court of the Gentiles—was accessible to non-Jews and surrounded by a special low balustrade with warning inscriptions pronouncing death to pagan visitors who passed its limit. As I have tried to show elsewhere, this balustrade, or soreg, stands as a model for Christian chancel screens cutting off sacred areas within ecclesiastical architecture in the early medieval period.3 As Jewish men and women moved away from the periphery of the Temple and toward the core of the building complex, they entered the Court of the Women, where Jewish men and women worshiped together, especially during the major Jewish festivals three times a year. Despite its name, then, the Court of the Women was not gender specific. It did represent, however, the ultimate spatial limit of women's participation in sacred ritual, a point beyond which women were not permitted to advance. Only Jewish men could proceed from this courtyard into the Court of the Israelites, and only a select caste of priests could move past another low barrier and approach the altar located in the Court of the Priests (Figure 3). Here, gallons of blood were spilled daily in sacred, sacrificial ritual. The ultimate spatial goal of the Jerusalem Temple, the Holy of Holies—the very residing place of God—lay in an enclosed space out of bounds to everyone, save the High Priest one day a year. This cursory tour of the Jerusalem Temple reveals several characteristics of sacred space as it was developed by the Jews. First, the Temple courtyards were associated with gradational levels of sanctity and human participants were structured accordingly. Moreover, there existed two separate areas where contact took place between the mundane and divine worlds. Foremost of these was the Holy of Holies, the site of God's presence in this place. Divine appearance—or "hierophany," to use the terminology of Eliade—acted as the principal force that gave the Temple its sacred status.4 The second place connecting the human realm to the heavenly one was in the altar area within the Court of the Priests. Bloody sacrifices to God secured Israel's communication with the powers that governed it. As we shall see, the distinction between these two architectural spaces—site of God's presence and site of sacrifice—will play an important role in the early church's reinvention of ancient spatial models and the placement of women in relation to the sacred. Our main contemporary source for descriptions of the Jerusalem Temple comes from the first-century Jewish writer Josephus. In reference to the spatial limits of women, he states:
The emphasis given to reproductive blood in this text is remarkable. The outer court on the Temple Mount barred none, including impure male Jews and uninitiated pagans. Women associated with reproductive blood, either in menstruation or after childbirth, were alone singled out as carriers of a taboo substance. Separated from all other forms of pollution, menses takes on an unparalleled and unprecedented significance in its ability to dictate admittance into the Temple precincts and cancel out the sanctity of an entire liturgical complex. The spatial regulations at work here had their roots centuries earlier
in Levitical purity laws.6 In the context of other
conduits of pollution (ejaculants and lepers, for example),
Leviticus 12 ascribes to a parturient, a woman who has recently
given birth, the longest period of purification before she can enter
holy grounds—40 days for a boy child and double that for a girl
child.7 The Hebrew text specifies that throughout that
time, "she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the
sanctuary, until the days of her purifying are fulfilled." During
that period, a woman "shall continue in the blood of her
purifying," In addition to their sanctifying capabilities, reproductive blood and sacrificial blood both embody life forces. The life-giving implications of women's reproductive blood are evident. But sacrificial blood is also figured as a life-embodying substance. Leviticus 17:10, for example, states, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes an atonement for the soul." The purifying and life-engendering associations of blood for ancient Israelite culture render blood as a highly charged and overdetermined substance. When the High Priest enters the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, it is not sacrificial meat he carries in, it is blood. The first food law in Genesis 9:4 is not about clean or unclean animals, it is about eating blood. Moreover, the early Christians will come full circle in Acts 15 by appropriating only the Jewish food laws that concern blood. In Leviticus, even the different types of blood from the same female reproductive system delineate blood's multivalent nature. Menses, a woman's regular, monthly flow of blood, demands up to 14 days of purification, while lochia, the blood of childbirth, mandates a 40- to 80-day wait. These proscriptions underscore the dangerous powers associated with human forces of procreation. Moreover, a woman who has just produced a girl child has redoubled life-bearing potential; her entrance into sacred realms where powers of sacrificial blood are at work potentially creates a rivalry in life-giving forces and purifying processes.8
Bloody Church The New Testament offers us the first glimpse into Christian anxiety about menstruation and sanctity in the story of the bleeding woman who touched Christ. In all three synoptic gospels (Matthew 9:20–22, Mark 5:24–34, and Luke 8:43–48), Jesus reverses the purity laws of Leviticus by allowing a woman with an issue of blood to come into proximity with the presence and power of the divine. Luke states:
Here an unnamed woman bleeding from her reproductive system13 comes into direct contact with what will develop in the tradition as the Eucharist incarnate; she receives a perceptible amount of the divine spirit—one might say an early type of communion—yet she does not defile the living sacrifice.14 In fact, Jesus blesses her for her daring action. But is her encounter with Christ as direct as it seems? All three gospel texts make clear that she touches only the extremities of his clothing,15 not his body, despite Christ's line of attestations: "Who touched me? Someone touched me. Power has gone forth from me." This small detail will become a critical one to theologians in their efforts to address the problem of menstruants handling the Eucharist.16 The earliest images we have of women in contact with the divine are connected to this story and come from ancient catacomb art. In the late third-century catacomb of Saints Pietro and Marcellino in Rome, a fresco portraying the woman with an issue of blood stays true to its textual source and shows no direct physical contact between the woman and Jesus' flesh (Figure 4). Any sense of tension between Christ and the menstruant seems, however, to be abated by Christ's gesture reaching toward the woman, an action that links his divine space with her female-gendered and female-bloodied space. Another painting from this catacomb (Figure 5) depicts a woman actually holding a chalice of wine and leading the Agape Feast.17 Here, a precursor to the Eucharist rests firmly in the hands of a woman or possibly even a female personification of the Agape Feast itself.18 All eyes turn toward her in her leadership role, and we might even be witnessing a diachronic narrative progression from left to right of three separate moments condensed into one image: blessing, drinking, and passing of cup to next person. Both frescoes from this catacomb—the woman with the issue of blood and the Agape Feast—depict female figures, each with their hands physically grasping different manifestations of the divine. What is missing, however, from both of these images (as well as many other catacomb paintings) is a clear sense of architectural context or space. An early artwork that does pay a great deal of attention to the spatial circumstances of women in contact with the Eucharist comes from the famous mosaics at San Vitale in sixth-century Ravenna (Figures 6, 7, and 8). Flanking the altar area in the East end of the church appear the images of Justinian on Christ's right and his wife, Theodora, on Christ's left. Within an iconographical program revolving around real and symbolic sacrifice, the royal Byzantine couple bring sacrificial accoutrements to the altar. Justinian presents the golden platter on which the Eucharistic bread will be placed, while Theodora carries the chalice that will hold the Eucharistic wine at the altar. At first take, they seem to be almost mirror images; both rulers are crowned, bejeweled, wearing halos, accompanied by courtly attendants, and portrayed in frontal position facing the viewer. But upon closer examination, distinct differences emerge. While no telling architectural feature identifies the space that Justinian occupies, Theodora's context is carefully constructed with an elaborate stage set including doorways, a water fountain, an area surmounted by a niche, and another one by a veil. Otto Von Simson has commented:
In essence, Theodora can be read as occupying two spaces, the sanctuary and the narthex. And then again, because of the spatial tension between the placement of this image in the altar area and its implied representation in the narthex, Theodora essentially occupies no space. She is in the altar area, yet she is not. Her juxtaposition and equality with Justinian as consors imperii, her association with the instruments of sacrifice—specifically the blood of Christ—and her presence in the apse have all been canceled out by the artistic imposition of an alternative environment. Even the inclusion of the water fountain alludes to purity laws required of those unclean. Furthermore, Theodora extends the readied chalice away from her own body and holds it in front of that of a male chaperone. Unlike Justinian's bread platter, the chalice is figured fully outside the realm of Theodora's bodily space. Through a series of visual devices, then, the empress's presence in the altar area as well as her association with the Eucharist have been placed under a kind of erasure, establishing a pictorial anxiety between women's space and sacrificial space.
Bloody Mary
To avoid the conflict between the onset of menses and Mary's presence in sacrificial space, the priests decide to wed Mary to Joseph, who conveniently removes her from the sacred precincts. In this text, the Christian approach to ancient Jewish practices involving women and sacrificial space is one of ambivalence and selectivity. The author has subjected a menstruating Mary to the purity laws of Leviticus denying menstruants entry into the Temple. At the same time, however, the author has departed from Jewish law by placing Mary next to the altar in the Court of the Priests, a sacrificial area where women, menstruating or not, were forbidden to go. Mary plays a pivotal role here as the bridge linking ancient Jewish practices to her fundamental identity as the preeminent Christian woman, thereby anticipating the predicament of Christian menstruants in ecclesiastical spaces for centuries to come. Here, even the bloody Mother of God has the power to pollute the bloody House of God.21 This text also articulates another Christian innovation that will determine church space to this day. After situating Mary's childhood years in the precincts of the altar, the Protevangelium of James quotes Joseph as saying to Mary, "You were brought up in the Holy of Holies and received food from the hand of an angel."22 As we have seen, however, only God's presence resided in the Holy of Holies in the ancient Jerusalem Temple, while sacrifices were offered to God on an altar in an altogether different courtyard, that of the priests. The narrative's conflation of these two separate areas forecasts a radical shift in both Christian theology and liturgical space. The altar area and the Holy of Holies will collapse and combine as one space in the Christian apse because, for the early Christians, God's presence and sacrifice unite into one and the same essence. In Christianity, the divine has become the ultimate sacrifice on the altar. The impetus for this unification is the continuation and radical reinterpretation of sacrificial ritual. In the church sanctuary, sacrifice is no longer made to God, but is God. For the Christian tradition, God and the sacrifice merge into one on the altar. This conflation of areas can be seen in material evidence as well. The sixth-century chapel of Theotokos at Mount Nebo in Jordan (Figures 9 and 10) displays a telling mosaic panel on the floor strategically positioned behind the chancel barrier and in front of the altar. The mosaic reveals the outline of an architectural complex approached by bulls and gazelles. S. J. Saller interprets the building as the Jerusalem Temple with an unmistakable fire burning in the altar area, and with an inner edifice representing the Holy of Holies. A Greek text taken from Psalm 51 serves as a header for the entire composition and describes a sacrificial setting, "Then they shall lay calves upon thy altar." Saller also traces these words to a fourth-century Greek liturgical text of Jerusalem.23 The mosaic maps out and coordinates a constellation of liturgical spaces—the priestly courtyard of the Jewish Temple, the Holy of Holies, Christian sacrificial space, and Christian hierophany. The amalgamated result submits the Christian altar area as the inventive progeny and consolidated synthesis of differentiated zones of the Jerusalem Temple. Christian attitudes toward the actual ruined, post-70 ce Temple Mount dramatically point, however, to an uncomfortable relationship to Jewish precursors. Despite the church's desire to imitate and appropriate the sanctity of the Jewish Temple in its liturgy and symbolism24, early medieval accounts tell us that during the fifth through seventh centuries, the Christians not only turned their backs on the sacred spot. Building everywhere else in the city, they used the Temple Mount as dumping grounds for garbage.25 Muslim literary evidence claims that when Umar entered seventh-century Jerusalem, he crawled on hands and knees through manure and trash in order to ascend the spoiled Temple Mount. One late Muslim chronicle from 1351, the Muthîr al-Ghirâm, recites Umar's encounter with the future site of the Dome of the Rock:
Whatever the polemical motives of this fascinating passage, it singles out reproductive blood once again as the worst defilement possible in this place. It also reveals a motif common to the three traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam throughout the Middle Ages: the incompatibility of menses and sacred space.27
Bloody Eucharist
To support his opinion, Dionysus refers to the New Testament, claiming, "For even the woman who had the 12-year discharge and was eager for a cure touched not him but only his fringe."30 And finally, rooting the purity law in ancient Jewish tradition, he explicitly conflates Christian altar space with Temple space, stating that anyone "who is not completely pure in both soul and body shall be prevented from approaching the holy and the holy of holies."31 In direct contrast to this, another third-century source from Palestine or Syria, the Didascalia Apostolorum, states, "You shall not separate those (women) who are in their menstrual course; for she also who had the flow of blood was not faulted when she touched the skirt of our Saviour's cloak, but was even assured the forgiveness of all her sins."32 Here, the author interprets the fringe of Christ's clothing to be as good as the flesh it encloses and thus employs the New Testament to dispel spatial tension between menstruants and ecclesiastical space. This type of conflicting evidence seems to characterize disparate local customs and practices in the early medieval period as well. While Canons 11 and 45 of Laodicea (fourth-century Anatolia) state that "women should not have access to the altar,"33 the Testamentum Domini Nostri Jesu Christi, a fifth-century document from Syria, claims that widows did take their place with the clergy within the veiled chancel area during the Eucharistic sacrifice to receive Holy Communion there.34 The same document prescribes, however, that a widow who was menstruating could neither receive Holy Communion nor approach the altar.35 Similarly, another Syrian text from 538, Questions Asked by the Priest Sargis, permits women to enter the sanctuary, to touch the holy vessels, and to pour wine into the chalice at the altar. Central in this discourse, establishing the limits of deaconesses, appears the following:
In both of these Syrian texts, women and sacrificial space are not seen as contentious entities; rather, the narratives point specifically to the discord between rivalrous bloods in the same space. In the West, three bishops of North Gaul write letters of admonishment in 511 to the priests of Breton who traveled with women—called conhospitae—and celebrated Mass in the countryside. The priests set up makeshift altars called tabulae where the women assisted them in the Holy Sacrifice by taking into their hands the chalice and by distributing the Blood of Christ to the people.37 Here ecclesiastical space is absent. Instead, it is the proximity of the Eucharist to women, menstruating or not, that incites the condemnation of the bishops. In a revolutionary move at the end of the sixth century, Gregory the Great breaks with ancient and Eastern forerunners in his treatment of menstruants and sacred places. Augustine of Canterbury asks whether a woman may properly enter church while menstruating. And may she receive communion at these times? Gregory answers emphatically:
This discourse clearly attempts to alleviate the perceived danger between the powers of menses and the Eucharist. Despite such efforts, Christian anxiety continues and in 688 Theodore of Tarsus, the Bishop of Canterbury, reverses Gregory's opinion by prohibiting menstruating women from entering the church and taking communion. In addition, he draws on biblical models and establishes a 40-day waiting period for women after childbirth.39 And a century later, Jonas of Orléans explicitly states that in the West women do not enter church during their times of "carnal impurity."40 In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, symbolically bloody realms remain inaccessible to physically bloody women.
Bloody Vestiges The fourteenth-century Byzantine mosaics from the church of the Kariye
Djami in Istanbul (Figure 11) manifest Christianity's
long-established, creative misreading of Jewish purity laws and
sacrificial spaces.44 Here, effectively located in the
domical vault at the entrance of the nave, the Presentation
of the Virgin in the Temple and the Virgin
Fed by Angels represent Mary's presence in the inner precincts of the Jerusalem Temple.45
Shown in diachronic progression, Mary first approaches the High
Priest, Zacharias, leaving her parents behind her, and then appears
behind a huge altar accepting angelic sustenance and enclosed by
boundary walls or chancel screens. The Greek inscription labeling
this scene as the Holy of Holies, Another mosaic, again from the church of the Kariye Djami, illustrates the tension raised by the oft-quoted New Testament text in its depiction of Christ healing the woman with the issue of blood (Figure 12).46 In contrast to the earlier catacomb fresco, the woman here appears in the center of the composition between two groups: Christ with his disciples to the left, and Jairus, the synagogue leader, and company to the right.47 Her undulating form, mirrored by the wavy form below her, acts to link these two camps. In so doing, she literally becomes a bridge that engages two legal systems, the Old Law, represented by the synagogue crowd, and the New Law, ushered in by the revolutionary actions and words of Jesus, here shown even holding a scroll, the sign of a new covenant. She is caught at the visual fulcrum of these incongruous worlds, just as her carnal, bloody counterparts in fourteenth-century Byzantium are the object of uneasy theological discourse. In an effort to reconcile the Hebrew Bible with the Gospels, Blastares even goes so far as to claim that a menstruant coming into contact with the Eucharist is "dangerous," and that women "purify themselves" with their monthly flow after birth.48 Such figurations of menses—as a dangerous and purifying substance—strongly resonate with nomenclature in Leviticus, casting reproductive blood in terms comparable to sacrificial blood. Theodore Balsamon, from twelth-century Byzantium, suggests that some sort of architectural divider be used to separate menstruating women from the rest of the church. He states, "It is fitting then, that these vestibules in which such unclean women are to stand should not directly occupy space in churches ... such places should be set apart so that the unclean women may stand in them without condemnation."49 Here, reproductive blood actually carves out alternative spaces in ecclesiastical architecture designed specifically for bloody women. Moreover, Balsamon's directive to marginalize women from the body of the church proper, reveals the vulnerability of not only the altar area to the presence of menstruants, but of the larger environs of the church itself. In fact, the New Testament's symbolization of the church as Christ's body50 lays the textual foundation for extending spatial prohibitions connected to sacrificial sites to the larger ecclesiastical contexts. To encounter the body of the church, then, is already to encounter the very body of Christ—the Eucharist, itself. In the West, medieval authors also seem to perceive a relationship of resemblance between the dangerous powers of bleeding women and the awesome powers of bleeding sacrifice. The source of those perceptions appear to be based not on Jewish models so much as on pagan ones. From Isidore of Seville in the mid-seventh century to Albertus Magnus and his student Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, medieval writers cite ancient sources—from Aristotle, pseudo-Democritus, and Aelian to Plutarch and Pliny the Elder—that discuss the sacred and magical properties of menses.51 Pliny states, for example, that "nothing could easily be found that is more remarkable than the monthly flux of women" and that menses has the unpredictable power to blight trees, kill bees, dull metal, and separate large quantities of asphalt in Judea!52 Most important, Pliny sees women's blood as "the material for human generation" inspiring life and endowing body to the unborn.53 The ability of menses to create life, work magic, defile and purify, becomes a common motif in the high and late Middle Ages. Christian theologians—for example, Archbishop Raban Maurus in 856, Bishop Sighard of Cremona in 1215, and Innocent III in 1216—quote verbatim Isidore's citation of Pliny commenting on the supernatural powers of reproductive blood, normally consigned to the divine realm.54 By the thirteenth century, works such as the French Bible Moralisée (Vienna Codex 2554, Figure 13) attest to a mimetic relationship between reproductive blood, sacrificial blood, and the Eucharist. Historians such as Caroline Walker Bynum have shown that in the West, both male and female writers in the high Middle Ages link the potent powers of bleeding women with the awesome powers of bleeding sacrifice, especially in their descriptions of Christ's painful death on the cross as a mother in labor giving birth. Within the two rondels shown here, this illuminated manuscript shows a typological creation of Eve and Ecclesia respectively from the sides of Adam and Christ.55 Christ, however, actually "gives birth" to a chalice-bearing church from his vaginal-side wound. Here, the generative and purifying affinities that exist between reproductive blood and the Eucharist take explicit visual form. Here, sacrificial blood and reproductive blood become one.
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The root for "purifying" here, 
,
plays a key role in describing not only reproductive blood, but in
defining sacrificial blood as well. Using the same term, Leviticus
16:14–19 tells us that Aaron, the High Priest, splashes animal
blood all over the altar area to "purify it" 
.
According to these and other biblical passages, the role of the two
bloods seems to be inseparable. Reproductive blood purifies;
sacrificial blood purifies. The two substances are conceptually and
linguistically connected as purifying agents that cleanse unclean
people and objects.
, embraces
the composition and reminds the participant that not only did Mary
enter the most sacred space of old—a synthesis of the altar area
and Holy of Holies—but that by approaching the nave of the Kariye
Djami itself, the worshiper too enters a sacred space, this time the
church as the New Temple superseding the one of old.
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Copyright 2010 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. |