At its core, the Moon embodies the passive and feminine aspects of existence. It’s a luminary beckoning us to look inward, inviting us to explore the depths of our subconscious mind. Like a mirror, it reflects our inner emotions, desires, and fears. This reflective quality serves as a reminder that our experiences aren’t solely influenced by the external environment, but also by our inner perceptions and responses. As the ruler of the unconscious mind, it represents the patterns and behaviors etched into our being over time. Just as the Moon goes through phases, waxing and waning, we too experience cycles of growth and introspection, often tied to past experiences and learned behaviors. These patterns shape our responses to the present and color our perception of the world.
The Moon has a connection with tribalism and it is is deeply rooted. Throughout history, people looked up to the night sky and saw a heavenly body that held sway over the nocturnal realm. It became associated with the Queen of the Night or the Goddess of Darkness, embodying the mysteries of the nighttime world and tapping into our primal instincts. In astrology, its influence extends to the zodiac sign of Cancer, one of the water signs, reinforcing its ties to emotions, intuition, and the ebb and flow of the tides. Just as the Moon’s gravitational pull affects the ocean’s tides, it also affects the emotional tides within us, influencing our moods and responses.
Menstrual Cycle and the Sisterhood of Women
The Moon’s synchronicity with the menstrual cycle underscores the relationship between the celestial and the earthly. The 28-day lunar cycle and the 28-day menstrual cycle in women have drawn parallels since ancient times. This association has further enriched this planet’s symbolism as a symbol of womanhood, cycles, and the interconnectedness of all life. In various languages and cultures, the Moon and menstruation have shared terminology, highlighting their interconnectedness. Menstruation is referred to as the “moment de la lune” in French, which translates as “time of the Moon.”
The Moon’s role in these cycles has shaped perceptions of femininity, rites of passage, and the innate connection between women throughout time. The monthly cycle is a natural phenomenon. Women become more attuned to their bodies and their own unique rhythms. As the Moon waxes and wanes, so does the ebb and flow of the inner tides. The monthly cycle holds significance within the collective sisterhood of women. Regardless of individual feelings or perceptions about it, the menstrual cycle unites women across cultures, generations, and time periods. It’s a shared experience transcendng borders and backgrounds, connecting women through the rhythms of life itself.
Moonlit Journeys
Looking back through the annals of history, women of antiquity shared this connection with the Moon and their own cycles. In ancient times, the onset of menstruation marked a momentous occasion, a rite of passage signifying the transition from girlhood to womanhood. This transition was a communal one, as it signaled a woman’s integration into the tribe or community as a fully-fledged member. As women bled with the Moon, they collectively acknowledged their roles as life-bringers, sustainers, and nurturers. The rhythms and the cycles of nature were reflections of their own cycles of creation, birth, and renewal. In this way, the Moon became a mirror of womanhood itself.
The Moon and Female Physiology
The stomach, breasts, and ovaries are important components of the female reproductive system, corresponding astrologically to the Moon and Cancer. Many women experience physical sensations and changes in these areas in sync with their menstrual cycle, particularly in the days leading up to their period. The cramping sensation in the stomach and soreness in the breasts are commonly reported premenstrual symptoms. They are thought to be influenced by hormonal fluctuations, primarily involving estrogen and progesterone. As the body prepares for menstruation, hormone levels shift, leading to changes in fluid retention, blood flow, and muscle contractions. These changes can contribute to the discomfort and tenderness that women often experience.
Emotionally, the time leading up to menstruation, commonly known as premenstrual syndrome (PMS), can also bring about mood swings, irritability, and emotional sensitivity. As the Moon goes through its phases, its gravitational pull affects the Earth’s tides, including the water within our bodies. Just as the Moon’s pull causes the ocean tides to rise and fall, it’s believed to influence the fluids within the human body, potentially contributing to the physical changes experienced by women.
Cravings, and Mood Changes
The menstrual cycle is an ancient rhythm, like the moon doing a dance inside the womb. However, instead of reverence, society often responds with sniggers, eye-rolls, or the blithe dismissal of “She’s hormonal,” as if the entirety of human emotion could be reduced to a monthly inconvenience. But what is happening? There are hormonal fluctuations, progesterone and oestrogen playing their cyclical tug-of-war, giving rise to a cocktail of potential effects: mood dips, energy crashes, cravings, and an emotional sensitivity that, in another context, we might call deep intuition.
Now, enter chocolate, humanity’s velvety panacea. It’s a sweet tooth rebellion; it’s biochemical self-soothing. Chocolate, dark and divine, says to the brain: “Have a bit of serotonin, love,” and perhaps a pinch of dopamine too. It’s nature’s edible cuddle. But then there are the stereotypes. The tired old trope of the “crazy woman on her period,” which is not only unfair, it’s intellectually lazy. “Too emotional” they say, as if emotion were a flaw rather than the force that fuels art, empathy, revolutions, and love. What’s truly mad is expecting people to live in a constant state of unaffected robotic equilibrium, never swayed by their inner tides. The menstrual cycle doesn’t make a woman irrational, it may, at times, make her more honest. Less able to politely swallow her grievances. More prone to crying at cat videos or raging against the injustice of it all. And you know what? Its not madness. It’s humanity turned up to eleven.
The menstrual cycle, so often dismissed, shushed, or whispered about behind hands in public loos, is in fact a physiological release of hormones. Yet this natural, cyclical unfolding of inner tides is frequently reduced to little more than a punchline, a cause for workplace eye-rolls or sitcom-level humor. It’s treated not as an ancient biological rhythm, but as a malfunction, something to be fixed, hidden, or apologized for. But we must ask: who decided that a steady, linear emotional state is the gold standard of human behavior? Who decreed that to be cyclical, to fluctuate, to feel things more deeply at certain times, is somehow less valid, less sane, or less human? “She’s on her period,” they say, to explain a tearful outburst or an impassioned rant, as though menstruation were a sort of monthly madness, a temporary suspension of rationality. But what if it’s the opposite? What if the veil is lifted during those days? What if the sensitivity is a feature?
We live in a society that exalts stoicism, control, composure. Feelings, unless they’re conveniently packaged or neatly expressed, are often pathologized. The menstrual cycle defies this neatness. There’s something deeply ironic, almost tragic, about the way culture treats premenstrual experiences. The very same traits we admire in art – emotional depth, vulnerability, unfiltered honesty – are condemned in real life when they arise in the form of hormones. A woman weeping over a love letter is romantic; a woman crying over nothing before her period is “irrational.” This double standard reveals more about our discomfort with emotion than it does about menstruation itself.
What’s more, the myth of the “emotionally insane” woman during her period has functioned as a convenient tool of dismissal. It has allowed entire generations of men, and systems, to ignore, minimize, or mock emotional expression. It creates a power imbalance, wherein the feelings of one half of the population are constantly up for debate, forever under suspicion. The menstrual cycle, with all its upheavals, is a natural process. It doesn’t render women irrational, it reveals them to be painfully, alive. To feel deeply, to cry unexpectedly, to want comfort and chocolate and warmth.
Menstruation’s Historical Taboos
Menstruation is the scarlet thread running through the loom of human history, tying women to the moon, to the earth, to each other, and, quite unfortunately, to centuries of superstition and shame. Across time and territory, menstruation has been treated as something altogether more arcane. In certain cultures, a menstruating woman was viewed as powerful, sometimes too powerful. She was quarantined, cloistered, kept away from the bread, the altar, the religious texts, the crops, as if her mere presence might sour the milk or anger the gods. Why? Because somewhere along the road from wonder to patriarchy, power in a woman became something to be feared.
These seclusion practices, though often cast today as archaic and oppressive, were not always born solely of disdain. In some cases, they emerged from a place of awe, a sense that something mystical was afoot. The blood pouring forth without wound, the cycle mirroring the moon, the apparent ability to bleed and not die, this was the stuff of legend, of holy dread. And as with many things we don’t understand, it was wrapped in myth and hedged in taboo. Menstruating women became both mysterious and suspicious: vessels of creation, yet somehow also defiled. Magical, but messy. Divine, but dangerous.
The tragic result of all this mystery-mongering is a modern world still squirming in these ancient anxieties. The discomfort that many men feel around menstruation isn’t inherent, it’s inherited. From schoolyard jokes to advertising using blue liquid instead of red, we are taught, subtly and not-so-subtly, menstruation is unmentionable. An unsightly, unseemly secret. But here’s the thing: secrecy breeds ignorance, and ignorance breeds fear. And so we arrive at the modern predicament, a world full of men (and some women too, let’s be honest) who, despite all our technology and talk of progress, still recoil at the mention of a period like it’s a curse from a Gothic novel.
What this reveals is a deeper societal unease with women’s bodies in their full, unedited expression. We like our bodies tidy, our emotions palatable, and our natural functions preferably out of sight. Menstruation resists that. It insists on being cyclical, unpredictable, and, shock horror, visible. Visibility threatens the illusion of control that so much of modern life is built upon. Yet, there is hope. In the wake of this cultural hangover, there is a growing chorus of voices, women, allies, educators, speaking with frankness, humor, and grace about menstruation. They are reclaiming it from the shadows as a symbol of power, renewal, and mysticism. Because there is something mystical about it – in the deep, undeniable mystery of being alive, of cycles, of rhythms that tie us to nature and one another.
The task now isn’t to sanitize menstruation into clinical irrelevance, nor to turn it into a shiny empowerment slogan, but to tell the truth. To recognize it as a complex, deeply human experience. It deserves neither disgust nor deification, but dignity. Let us cast off the rusted chains of ignorance and myth, and let menstruation return to its rightful place in the naturalness of the body. Because there is nothing unclean about the shedding of a womb’s lining, only the shedding of old, tired beliefs no longer serving us.