The Womb, The Waters, And The Memory Of The Blood

This is an essay on blood, water, and memory – and the rituals that once wove body and land together from first bleed to last.

To tend the womb is to tend a well – a source of life, wisdom, and memory, as the ancients of Ireland knew. In the old stories, every well was tended by women, guardians who kept the waters clear and flowing. A neglected well was a grave matter, for when the guardians were driven away or their rites broken, the waters either dried up or spilled out in destructive flood. Wells were not only places of physical thirst – they were sources of wisdom, memory, and song. The womb was understood in much the same way: a vessel of waters, a small sea where ancestry, dream, and future converged. To dishonour it was to risk drought of the spirit. To tend it was to keep the whole being fertile.

Blood as remembering

In earlier times, the blood was never shameful. It was the red thread by which a woman measured her belonging to moon, tide, and earth. At menarche, there were rites – gatherings at rivers, washing in springs, blessings spoken and songs sung. The cycle itself was a calendar – a moon-clock written into flesh. Each bleed was not a defect but an offering, and in some folk practices blood-soaked cloths were placed beneath hawthorn or elder trees, a gift back to the land that nourished. What left the body returned to the soil, joining the long exchange between human and earth.

Menstrual blood was also understood as a sacred gift because it is the only non-violent blood – the only blood that leaves the body without wound, cut, or weapon. Flowing as part of the natural cycles, it required no injury and no harm. In ritual it was recognised as a rare and holy offering, carrying great value as something given freely by the body. To pour it back to the land was to honour this sacred exchange – a gesture of reciprocity between body and earth that asked nothing but remembering. Unlike sacrificial rites that required the spilling of animal or human blood, this blood needed no violence to be sacred.

Across cultures, rites of blood marked the thresholds of a woman’s life. At menarche, the first blood was often celebrated as an initiation into rhythm and belonging. In Ireland, fragments of lore tell of girls being bathed in springs or blessed at holy wells, welcomed into kinship with the moon’s tides. Elsewhere, red flowers or beads were worn to signal the new phase of life. Blood was not hidden – it was named, honoured, witnessed. Her first blood was a doorway, not just for her, but for the whole community that now counted her among the moon-keepers.

In the years of regular cycling, ritual practice often turned to reciprocity – placing cloths at tree roots, returning blood to the garden, painting soil with its red. Women recognised that what left the body could feed the earth, and what the earth yielded in return – food, herb, flower – completed the cycle of exchange. This practice was both ecological and spiritual, teaching that fertility belongs not only to the human body but to the land itself.

At childbirth, blood became another rite – the crossing of waters that ushered life into the world. The red and the clear mingled, midwives invoking blessings for safe passage. Birth blood was seen as dangerous and holy at once – a liminal fluid, like the waters of wells that heal but can also overwhelm. Here blood became both threshold and bridge – a passage for another life, marked by awe and danger.

With menopause, the rites shifted again. The final bleed was marked in some traditions with ceremony, feasting, or storytelling – an honouring of the years the womb had kept tide. The end of bleeding was not the end of power but its transmutation. No longer cycling with the moon, a woman was understood to carry the moon within her. In Irish lore, the Cailleach embodies this phase – winter-keeper, storm-bringer, elder who carries memory for the whole community. Her blood no longer flowed outward, but its power was thought to be inwardly distilled, becoming wisdom, sight, and authority. Her power was no longer tidal but distilled, the inward moon she now carried for the people.

Blood, then, was never only private. It was a thread connecting body, land, and cosmos – a reminder that the waters of the womb are kin to rivers, tides, rains, and storms. From first bleed to last, each stage of life carried ritual acknowledgements that kept women woven into the cycles of the more-than-human world.

Blood is also a teacher of impermanence. It comes and goes, arrives and recedes, a tide within the body. Psychology recognises in it a rhythm of death and renewal – the letting go of what is no longer needed, the clearing for what is to come. Eco-psychology widens this: the blood is not separate from the waters of the world but part of the same elemental cycle. Menstrual blood carries the salt and minerals of ancient seas. It is a private ocean, ebbing and flowing in tune with the wider tides.

Water as shapeshifter

Water is never one thing. It is mist that blurs a mountain’s face, stream that babbles and meanders, tide that pounds cliffs, ice that locks the land in stillness. Water’s nature is to shift shape – never fixed. So too is the womb – sometimes still cavern, sometimes flowing river, sometimes storm that sweeps through the whole body. In living with the womb, we learn impermanence not as an idea but as a lived truth. There is no state of being to cling to. All is change.

This shapeshifting mirrors the great rivers of Ireland, whose origins lie in women approaching wells of wisdom. Boann – goddess of the Boyne – dared to approach the forbidden Well of Segais. She walked around it sunwise, though warned not to, and the waters rose against her, bursting the well’s bounds. They carried her body away, dissolving it into the new river that bore her name. Her transgression was also her offering – she became river, flowing still.

Sinann too – the young woman who sought wisdom at the same well – was drowned as the waters broke forth, giving birth to the Shannon, the longest river of Ireland. Her death is her transformation, her name woven into the living water that sustains the land. Both figures show us that wisdom is not gained without cost, without blood, without dissolution of the self we once thought permanent.

These are not only river myths – they are womb myths. The well is the womb, a deep chamber of memory and potential. To approach it is to risk being undone, for the waters carry both blessing and destruction. The womb likewise shapeshifts – sometimes well of stillness, sometimes flood that overwhelms. In tending it, we honour its nature as both nurturer and storm-bearer.

The womb as memory keeper

The womb remembers. Not only through genetic inheritance but through the quiet storing of stories, griefs, silences. Trauma sinks into it like silt at the bottom of a river – heavy, unseen. Yet blood is the river’s cleansing. Each cycle, old griefs are given chance to move, to be released with the waters. What psychology calls trauma, the body calls sediment – and every tide is an invitation to stir, to let go, to begin again.

Irish cosmology holds memory not in books but in landscape – every river, hill, and stone is a keeper of story. The womb is part of that landscape. It is the inward geography where memory pools. To tend the womb is to tend this memory – to acknowledge the lineages, the silences, the lost songs, and to allow them to move once more through ritual, through bleeding, through prayer.

The skin as second mouth

The skin too belongs in this litany. It is our largest organ, porous and alive, speaking in gooseflesh, scar, and rash. It hungers as the mouth does – drinking oils, herbs, waters. When we anoint it with wild rose or clary sage, when we wash it in river water or bathe it in sea, we are feeding it. The skin is not a wall but a shoreline – where body meets world, where air, rain, and wind are tasted. The womb bears water, the skin bears weather. Both are thresholds – both remind us we are not sealed but open, not bounded but breathing.

Brigid as well-tender

If Boann and Sinann show us the cost and consequence of approaching the well, Brigid shows us the tending. Saint and goddess alike, she is keeper of flame and well – holding fire in one hand and water in the other. Her wells, scattered across Ireland, are still visited with rags tied to trees, prayers spoken, waters drunk or bathed in. At her wells, too, offerings were laid with care – gifts that asked no harm, mirroring the body’s own gift of non-violent blood. Brigid’s presence reminds us that to keep water flowing, tending is required – not only approach, not only transgression, but steady care.

So too with the womb. It is not enough to bleed and forget. Tending asks for rhythm – listening, nourishing, honouring. Offering herbs, warmth, stillness. Listening for the subtle messages it carries. Without tending, waters stagnate. With tending, they flow clear – carrying wisdom and renewal.

Blessing and warning

Water is never only blessing. It baptises, heals, renews – but it also drowns, overwhelms, destroys. The womb shares this dual nature. To romanticise it is to dishonour its truth. Pain, loss, miscarriage, silence, shame – these too are part of its waters. To tend the womb is not to idealise but to meet it honestly – as the place where blood, pleasure, grief, and creation all converge.

A philosophy of pace

To live by the womb is to live by another rhythm. Not the clock’s relentless ticks, but the moon’s waxing and waning, the ebb and flow of tide, the slow swell of seasons. Philosophy here is not abstract but lived – the pace of bleeding, of renewing, of surrendering, of rising again. Eco-philosophy roots this in the wider world – our blood carries the same salt as the Atlantic, the same minerals as the limestone caves of Clare, the same tides that push salmon upriver. Psychology recognises in this the movement of renewal – the courage to let go, the willingness to let hidden waters cleanse.

Return to the well

To tend the womb is to return, again and again, to the well. To remember that the waters within us are kin to the waters without – the spring hidden in the hillside, the holy well at the crossroads, the tide washing against western cliffs. To pour our blood back into the story of the land is to re-enter reciprocity. What we give returns. What we release flows on. What we honour continues.

The well, the womb, the water – all call us to remember. To tend what sustains. To honour what cleanses. To trust that what we release flows on.

And to remember, too, that menstrual blood is the only non-violent blood – shed without wound or weapon, offered by the body in its own rhythm. To give it back to the land is to restore a covenant older than memory – a sacred exchange between body and earth, where what is given freely returns as blessing. From menarche’s first tide to the last release of menopause, each stage carries its own wisdom, its own ritual, its own offering. In the end, blood teaches us that nothing is wasted, nothing is lost – all flows back into the great waters that hold us, renew us, and remember us.

To bleed is to belong.

To tend is to remember.

To return is to renew.

And to honour what flows is to keep the covenant alive.

If you feel drawn to going deeper on the themes of the womb, blood rights, traditions, lunar being, and much more, you might like to explore Niamh's self paced online offering Womb Rhythms: A Triple Spiral Exploration of the Four Fold Womb™. Womb Rhythms™ is a self-paced online offering, a layered exploration of cyclical embodiment through the elemental lens of Earth, Sun, and Moon. Rooted in Irish cosmology, myth, the menstrual cycle, and the subtle anatomy, Womb Rhythms™ invites you to walk an ancient path in a contemporary way — gently, thoroughly, and in rhythm with your own unfolding. It is a gathering space for remembering: of what the land teaches, what the womb remembers, and what lives just beneath the surface of our modern forgetting.

The original artworks you see here on this page are by Niamh Criostail, created using sustainably hand gathered earth pigments that she crafted into watercolour paints. If you are interested in learning how to do this, then you might like to check out the Wild Colour Cauldron™ - her monthly home subscription programme for those looking to develop a more sustainable, earth friendly, grounded, and organic, land based spiritual practice through art and creative expression. Each month, subscribers receive Niamh's hand crafted pigments and mark making mediums by post along with accompanying tutorials, color stories, creative tutorials, wild colour plant seeds, and much more. You can read more about this richly creative and colourful offering here, or sign up for the upcoming cycle of the year here.

The above article was first shared as a seasonal reflection in Niamh's Autumn 2025 newsletter. This piece weaves Irish myth, eco-psychology, and the body’s own waters into a meditation on wells, wombs, and the tides of memory, tending, and renewal. If you would like to receive future writings like this, you can sign up for her seasonal newsletter here.

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