"These women-'daughters of the Rainbow'-are indeed 'like a snake', for no creature on earth more closely resembles a river or flow, or can coil itself into so many repeated cycles. And women are indeed 'like a rainbow'-because the blood-flow is not mere physical blood. As the symbol of the sex-strike, it carries women as if from world to world. Under the blood's spell, women move from their 'dry' phase to the 'wet', from the 'cooked' to the 'raw', and also from marital life to the world of seclusion and blood unity-just as the rainbow leaps cyclically between sunshine and rain, dry season and wet, earth and sky." (477)

This story forms the uniting core of Aboriginal ritual life. It is reenacted again and again, and without exception, it is reenacted by males. Despite the fact that initiated males are the first to admit that this Snake business is 'women's business,' woman is deliberately excluded from these mysteries, and the instructions she is given seem "precise mirror-image inversions" (469) of the 'insider information':

"When a woman is pregnant...she should keep away from pools and streams, for fear of the Rainbow-other women should get water for her.
Babies are especially vulnerable to attack from the Rainbow. In rainy weather, or if she gets near water, a mother should paint herself and her baby with yellow ochre or termite mound. And a menstruating woman should not touch or even go close to a pregnant woman or baby, or walk about in the camps, or go near a waterhole that other people are using. Traditionally, she should stay in seclusion, with a fire burning constantly to keep the Rainbow away." (467)

In place of solidarity, female segregation and seclusion are the rule. Initiated males know that the Rainbow is females' kin. "To be engulfed by its power would have been to feel an immense sense of kinship solidarity and strength," (469) a solidarity and strength males experience in initiation rituals "designed to sustain the reproductivity of both human and natural realms," (470) in which men cut themselves and one another and shed large amounts of blood. As with the story from the Amazon I opened with, one feels oneself in the presence of an elaborate 'cover story,' designed to disempower, separate, and marginalize females. The very existence of such stories and the extreme prohibitions around menstrual blood suggest at the very least a deep "charge' around the issue of female power. To Knight this constitutes evidence of an earlier time when, if we take these very same males at their word, females were acknowledged as the originators and sustainers of ritual life just as they were revered as the sources of human life itself.