separation from above and below. Ancient cultures used menstrual imagery to explain and connect the events around them. Menstrual rites, once established, also provided ways to organize other aspects of life, including childbirth, illness and death. People also used metaforms as a tool to understand cause and effect and nature's patterns. They could then begin to predict events such as rainfall and other natural phenomena. By sharing and externalizing metaformic consciousness, our pre-human ancestors left Chaos. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove point out that, "Our words for 'mind' and 'civilization' came from words which mean 'moon experience,'" referring to the connection between menstruation and the moon. The Four Categories of Metaforms Based on content, all metaforms fall into four categories: Wilderness, Cosmetic, Narrative, and Material. Wilderness Wilderness metaforms often include creatures, formations, and elements of nature that depict menstrual ideas. The most common wilderness metaforms feature a creature attracted to female blood or possessing a suggestively feminine shape. The theory analyzes the ways in which many ancient cultures used a variety of animals in metaformic mythology. The Wild Dog family, a common deity of tribes in Africa, Eurasia, and North and South America is commonly used in such mythologies of ancient cultures. The wild dogs, attracted to the smell of blood, created a necessity of seclusion for menstruating women during ancient times. This necessity led to women's menstrual seclusion rites, such as huts built in trees or burying the menstruant and her scents waist deep in a pit with a shelter over her. This seclusion may be seen as a sacrifice to keep the tribe safe from predators, as they were attracted to the smell of blood and the farther the menstruant was from her tribe, the safer they were. Snakes often appear in metaformic mythologies, such as the Wawilak Sisters Snake myth of Australian aboriginal people. Deities from many different cultures are presented in the form of a snake or serpent. In Central America, the Aztec goddess of creation was a snake and in ancient Greece, Gaia, the earth goddess, was a serpent. Cosmetic Cosmetic metaforms use "human body action, artful movement, shape, ornament and decoration, and even ingestion of meaningful foods," to depict methods of organization of the world. Cosmetic metaforms are the ways in which menstruation rites were made visible upon women's bodies, through various forms of modifications. For many cultures, cosmetic expression after the conclusion of