to argue that the origin of the occult powers attributed to the feminine organism is to be found in primitive ideas concerning blood.  Not only menstrual blood but any kind of blood is the object of such feelings among savage and barbarous peoples.  All sorts of precautions must be observed with regard to blood; in it resides a divine principle, or as Romans, Jews, and Arabs believed, life itself.  The prohibition to drink wine, the blood of the grape, found among some peoples, is traced to its resemblance to blood, and to its sacrificial employment (as among the ancient Arabians and still in the Christian sacrament) as a substitute for drinking blood.  Throughout, blood is generally taboo, and it taboos everything that comes in contact with it.  Now woman is chronically “the theatre of bloody manifestations,” and therefore she tends to become chronically taboo for the other members of the community.  “A more or less conscious anxiety, a certain religious fear, cannot fail to enter into all the relations of her companions with her, and that is why all such relations are reduced to a minimum.  Relations of a sexual character are specially excluded.  In the first place, such relations are so intimate that they are incompatible with the sort of repulsion which the sexes must experience for each other; the barrier between them does not permit of such a close union.  In the second place, the organs of the body here specially concerned are precisely the source of the dreaded manifestations.  Thus it is natural that the feelings of aversion inspired by women attain their greatest intensity at this point.  Thus it is, also, that of all parts of the feminine organization it is this region which is most severely shut out from commerce.”  So that, while the primitive emotion is mainly one of veneration, and is allied to that experienced for kings and priests, there is an element of fear in such veneration, and what men fear is to some extent odious to them.[364]

These conceptions necessarily mingled at a very early period with men’s ideas of sexual intercourse with women and especially with menstruating women.  Contact with women, as Crawley shows by abundant illustration, is dangerous.  In any case, indeed, the same ideas being transferred to women also, coitus produces weakness, and it prevents the acquisition of supernatural powers.  Thus, among the western tribes of Canada, Boas states:  “Only a youth who has never touched a woman, or a virgin, both being called te ’e ’its, can become shamans.  After having had sexual intercourse men as well as women, become t ’k-e ’el, i.e., weak, incapable of gaining supernatural powers.  The faculty cannot be regained by subsequent fasting and abstinence."[365] The mysterious effects of sexual intercourse in general are intensified in the case of intercourse with a menstruating woman.  Thus the ancient Indian legislator declares that “the wisdom, the energy, the strength, the sight, and the vitality of a man who approaches a woman covered with menstrual excretions utterly perish."[366] It will be seen that these ideas are impartially spread over the most widely separated parts of the globe.  They equally affected the Christian Church, and the Penitentials ordained forty or fifty days penance for sexual intercourse during menstruation.